Wednesday, 22 July 2026
The interesting money this week is in rock and gas, not metal, so let me start there and come back to the Copperbelt at the end.
The headline deal is Koch and OCP. Koch Ag & Energy is buying into Jorf Fertilizers Company I, an OCP Nutricrops plant at Jorf Lasfar in Morocco that can turn out up to 1.2 million tonnes a year of phosphate fertilizer. The two sides go 50/50 on close. Stacked on top of Kofert, the venture Koch half-bought in 2022, that gives the pair a combined 2.5 million tonnes a year of phosphate capacity out of the world's largest phosphate complex, aimed squarely at North American farmers. The timing is not an accident: Washington has temporarily suspended countervailing duties on Moroccan phosphate imports, so OCP tonnes that were priced out of the US are suddenly welcome again. Watch what that pull does to DAP and MAP availability for everyone else, Africa included.
Nitrogen is being poured, everywhere
Argentina keeps building. Pampa Energía has picked KBR's ammonia technology for a new plant, and Tecnimont, the MAIRE arm, has taken the EPC and start-up work for a large-scale complex there. Vaca Muerta gas is finding its way into urea and ammonia, and a new low-cost exporter in the southern hemisphere changes the arithmetic for anyone shipping nitrogen into Latin America and West Africa over the next three years.
India is pulling in the opposite direction. The government's new urea self-sufficiency policy, out on 15 July, is designed to wean the world's biggest urea buyer off imports. If it bites, the tonnes India stops tendering for have to find another home, and that is broadly bearish for urea into the back half of the year, granular values in Europe already look soft with German CAN slipping to €340 to €360 CIF.
The counterweight is the Gulf. The interim US-Iran peace has frayed again and Hormuz traffic has fallen. Every urea and sulphur cargo out of Saudi, Qatar, the UAE and Oman moves through that water, so freight and insurance risk is the swing factor that could offset all the new supply in one bad week.
Closer to home, Malawi cleared the Mulalo Granular plant at Mchemela in Dowa District, another small step in landlocked Southern Africa trying to blend and granulate its own product rather than import finished bags.
Copperbelt and a Dubai footnote
Zambia's mining story is still about new rock coming on. KoBold broke ground at Mingomba near Chililabombwe in April, one of the higher-grade copper deposits found in a generation. That is years out, so it does not move the physical market today, it does tell you where the smart capital thinks the Copperbelt is going.
One oddity worth filing: the electoral commission says every ballot paper for the coming vote will be flown from Dubai to Lusaka. An election year in a copper economy is a logistics and political-risk variable, keep it on the board.
More when the Gulf tells us something.