BbBBABSAL
Rail tracks and industrial infrastructure, library photograph

Where we work

The metal is where the geology put it. The demand is somewhere else.

Bbabsal is building at the two points where capability is scarcest, and at neither of them is anything yet in production.

Two geographies, one problem

01

Resources and industrial capacity rarely occur in the same place.

Almost everything difficult about critical minerals follows from that single fact. The metal is where the geology put it. The demand is where the factories are. Between them sit rail, ports, tariffs, permits and forty years of decisions about what a country should make itself.

Distance is the cheap part of that problem. Capability is the expensive part.

Copperbelt Lobito Michigan Boundaries: Natural Earth. Routes shown schematically.
Ground to industry. Concentrate moves from the Central African Copperbelt by rail to the Atlantic coast, then by sea to industrial demand. Routes shown schematically. Boundaries from Natural Earth.

Zambia

02

The Central African Copperbelt is the largest sedimentary copper province on earth. It has been mined for a century, which means the easy answers were taken long ago and what remains rewards method over luck.

Early exploration. No declared mineral resource or reserve.

  • Targets ranked from a national airborne dataset before drilling is committed
  • BHP Xplor 2026 finalist, with technical input from BHP
  • Consent of the communities whose land the work crosses, treated as a licence rather than a courtesy
The Central African Copperbelt ZAMBIA DEM. REP. CONGO Boundaries: Natural Earth. Belt axis shown schematically.
The Central African Copperbelt. Belt axis shown schematically across Zambia and the southern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Boundaries from Natural Earth.

The United States

03

A copper processing facility in development in Michigan, on a site that has already carried industry. Rod, wire, cable and oxygen free copper, which is what American manufacturers buy.

Building on an existing industrial site rather than open ground matters because it inherits the three things a new plant waits years for: land already permitted for industry, a grid connection sized for it, and trades living within reach of the gate. That is the difference between capacity arriving this decade and capacity arriving in the next.

The site is fully built. Fit out for production is in development.

Metals processing plant, library photograph
What the country has left. The United States operates two primary copper smelters and two primary electrolytic refineries. Source: United States Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries, January 2025.

What is not settled

04

Three things have to be true before the plant is financed, and none of them is yet. They are listed in the order they have to happen, because that order is the schedule.

  • Feedstock. Secured concentrate supply at a volume and grade the plant is designed around
  • Offtake. Committed buyers for the finished metal, which is what makes the plant financeable
  • Capital structure. Debt and equity assembled against those two contracts, not ahead of them

All three are under discussion, and a discussion will not be described as a commitment.