By: OrePulse

Vedanta's Konkola Copper Mines has signed a $498 million contract with China's NERIN Engineering to build a copper recovery plant in Chingola, Zambia's Copperbelt province, which the companies say will be the continent's largest such facility.

The plant will use leaching technology to extract copper from mine tailings — the finely ground waste material left over from decades of ore processing at KCM's operations — rather than from newly mined rock. Reprocessing tailings allows a mining company to recover metal from material it has already dug up and milled, without the cost and lead time of developing a new ore body. Once built, the Chingola facility is expected to add about 70,000 metric tons of copper production a year. NERIN Engineering will handle engineering, procurement and construction of the plant, along with commissioning support, performance testing and training services once it is up and running.

The investment supports Zambia's stated goal of lifting national copper production to 3 million metric tons a year by 2031, up from 890,346 metric tons produced in 2025 — an increase of more than threefold in roughly five years. Zambia is currently Africa's second-largest copper producer, trailing only the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Reprocessing tailings has become an increasingly attractive option in established mining regions such as the Copperbelt, where generations of processing have left behind large volumes of material that still contains recoverable copper, often at grades that become economic to reprocess as extraction technology improves and copper prices climb. For KCM, the Chingola project offers a way to add output relatively quickly compared with the years typically required to bring a new mine into production.

The agreement also deepens Chinese engineering involvement in Africa's copper supply chain, as global demand for the metal climbs steadily. Copper use is rising with power grid expansion, renewable energy construction, data center buildout, and electric vehicle production, as countries pursue broader energy transition goals that rely heavily on the metal's conductive properties. That demand backdrop has made copper one of the most closely watched industrial metals in recent years and has drawn growing investor and government interest in projects that can add new supply, whether through new mines or recovery efforts like KCM's tailings plant.

For Zambia, the deal signals renewed confidence in a copper sector the government has made central to its broader economic strategy. Meeting the 3-million-ton target by 2031 is expected to require a mix of new mine developments, expansions at existing operations and projects such as KCM's Chingola plant that recover copper from material already sitting above ground rather than requiring new extraction.