When the Strait of Hormuz closed to commercial dry bulk traffic on February 28, 2026, the immediate casualty was not just shipping schedules: it was the chemical input that makes copper and cobalt mining possible across central Africa. The DRC and Zambia source roughly 90 percent of their sulfur from the Gulf, and with China simultaneously banning sulfuric acid exports, the Copperbelt now faces a midstream supply crisis that has already forced Ivanhoe Mines to revise production guidance downward and put up to $1.1 billion in cobalt exports at risk through an administrative failure at Congo's strategic minerals regulator.
Introduction
This story matters to anyone who buys, finances, or regulates copper and cobalt: the battery metals, the defense inputs, the building wiring. The crisis unfolding across the DRC-Zambia Copperbelt is not a freight cost problem. It is a chemical input crisis, and that distinction changes everything about how you respond to it.
To understand why, you need to know one thing about how a large share of Congolese copper is actually produced. Much of the ore in the DRC is what geologists call oxide ore, and oxide ore cannot be processed by conventional smelting alone. Instead, miners use a hydrometallurgical process: they flood crushed ore with dilute sulfuric acid, which dissolves the copper and cobalt compounds out of the rock, producing a solution that is then refined into pure metal. No acid, no metal. The process is non-negotiable for this ore type, and it accounts for roughly 20 percent of global copper mine supply.
The Strait of Hormuz closed to commercial dry bulk traffic on February 28, 2026, after the outbreak of U.S.-Iran conflict. An interim peace treaty has since largely halted the fighting, but the disruption is still working its way through supply chains months later. The Middle East produces roughly one-third of global sulfur and handles approximately half of seaborne sulfur trade. For the Copperbelt, that is not a background statistic: it is the operational reality, because DRC and Zambia source approximately 90 percent of their sulfur from the Gulf region.
Then, on April 10, 2026, China announced it would halt exports of sulfuric acid starting in May, removing what had been one of the last flexible sources of alternative supply. Russia extended its own sulfur export ban through June 2026, and Turkey signaled restrictions through the second and third quarters. The Akin Gump law firm described the result plainly in a late-April alert: the global sulfuric acid market is experiencing a supply shock not seen since 2008. Two independent events have converged to remove a substantial portion of available supply at a moment when the market had no buffer.
The Scale of the Price Shock
Price data tells the story of how fast the market moved. S&P Global Platts assessed the FOB Middle East sulfur price at $695 to $700 per metric ton on March 19, 2026, a $200 per metric ton increase from pre-conflict levels in a matter of weeks. The CFR Mejillones benchmark used by Chilean copper miners roughly doubled in under seven weeks, with a single-week spike of 26.7 percent following China's announcement. In China itself, domestic sulfuric acid prices nearly doubled from $149 per metric ton in the first week of March to $307 per metric ton by mid-April, a 106 percent increase in six weeks.
For the DRC, the numbers are starker. Delivered sulfuric acid prices in the country reached $1,000 to $1,400 per metric ton by late April, according to analysis from Akin Gump citing Lexology data. The Copperbelt imports roughly two million metric tons of sulfur annually to manufacture approximately six million metric tons of sulfuric acid for oxide copper leaching operations, supplemented by another 2.5 million metric tons generated as a byproduct by regional copper smelters.
Kpler's vessel-level tracking data captured the physical reality within days of the Hormuz closure: by April, more than 600,000 metric tons of sulfur had piled up on Gulf vessels with no exit. In the first quarter of 2026, global sulfuric acid imports fell from 113,000 tonnes to just 29,200 tonnes, a collapse of nearly 75 percent in a single quarter. These are not marginal tightening figures; they represent a structural rupture in the supply chain connecting Middle Eastern refineries to African mines.
Ivanhoe's Guidance Cuts and the Partial Regional Buffer
Ivanhoe Mines' Kamoa-Kakula operation in the DRC has become the clearest public indicator of how the crisis is affecting actual production. In January 2026, Ivanhoe set full-year copper production guidance at 380,000 to 420,000 tonnes. By March 31, that range had been revised down to 290,000 to 330,000 tonnes. In late July, the company tightened the range again, to 290,000 to 310,000 tonnes. The 2027 guidance of 380,000 to 420,000 tonnes remains unchanged, suggesting the company views the disruption as temporary rather than structural, but the near-term production loss is real and substantial.
What makes the Kamoa-Kakula situation analytically interesting is that the facility is simultaneously a victim of the broader acid shortage and a partial beneficiary of it. The complex houses the largest copper smelter in Africa, which generates sulfuric acid as a smelting byproduct. In the second quarter of 2026, the smelter sold 120,000 tonnes of sulfuric acid at an average price of $465 per tonne, with third-quarter contracts surging to approximately $840 per tonne, a 100 percent increase year-to-date. That acid revenue contributed roughly $56 million to Kamoa-Kakula's $880 million in Q2 revenue, providing a partial financial cushion against copper production shortfalls.
Ivanhoe's operation supplies acid to nearby oxide copper producers within the DRC, giving it a role as a regional buffer supplier even as it manages its own smelter at roughly 60 percent of design capacity. Ivanhoe Executive Co-Chair Robert Friedland acknowledged in April that the acid shortage will have repercussions for global copper production, while noting that the full extent of the impact on individual Congolese mines remains unclear. Kamoa-Kakula produced 64,328 tonnes of copper in Q2 at a cash cost of $2.84 per pound, and the company reported Q2 profit of $46 million and adjusted EBITDA of $179 million. The numbers are resilient, but the downward guidance revision from 380,000-420,000 to 290,000-310,000 tonnes represents a production loss of roughly 90,000 to 110,000 tonnes at the midpoint.
The ARECOMS Crisis: Administrative Failure Threatens $1.1 Billion in Cobalt Exports
If the acid shortage is the structural threat to the Copperbelt, the ARECOMS administrative crisis is the acute one. ARECOMS is Congo's Authority for the Regulation and Control of Strategic Mineral Substances' Markets, the body that administers cobalt export quotas. The DRC produces roughly 70 percent of the world's mined cobalt, and the quota system is the regulatory architecture that governs how much of it can leave the country.
For 2026, ARECOMS set an annual export limit of 96,600 metric tons, composed of an 87,000 metric ton base quota allocated to producers and a 9,600 metric ton strategic quota for nationally significant projects. The three dominant quota holders are CMOC Group, Glencore, and Eurasian Resources Group, which together control over 60 percent of total permitted allocations. Under the framework, any first-half quota volumes unused by June 30 are automatically forfeited and reassigned to ARECOMS's strategic reserve.
The problem that surfaced in early July was not policy disagreement; it was a missing step in bureaucratic procedure. ARECOMS had set a July 5 deadline for companies to use their first-half allocations, but producers found they could not register export declarations on the customs platform from July 1 onward. A July 2 letter from Congo's Chamber of Mines to ARECOMS, seen by Reuters, explained the blockage: ARECOMS had simply not sent customs the formal notification required to authorize continued processing of quota-linked exports. The platform was frozen not by design but by omission.
Industry sources told Reuters that 60 to 75 percent of companies were unlikely to meet the July 5 deadline as a result. One industry source estimated the disruption could result in up to 20,000 metric tons of missed cobalt shipments worth approximately $1.1 billion at current prices. Producers asked ARECOMS to fix the platform and extend the deadline, and also asked Congo's prime minister to intervene directly. As of mid-July, no public resolution had been reported. The incident compounds an already fraught picture: Glencore reported that its own-sourced cobalt production dropped 39 percent in recent periods partly because the quota system has changed how producers manage mine planning, with copper becoming the clearer operational priority inside DRC assets.
Benchmark cobalt metal prices entered 2026 at roughly $56,414 per metric ton, recovering from a baseline of around $21,000 in early 2025, a recovery of over 160 percent since the DRC first locked down shipments. Fastmarkets projects a shortfall of approximately 10,700 metric tons against projected 2026 demand of 292,300 metric tons. Roman Aubry, nickel and cobalt analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, put the structural issue plainly: "2025 has demonstrated the risks associated with having a single country being responsible for the majority of supply."
Zambia's Export Restrictions, the Kasumbalesa Collapse, and the Logistics Compound
Building on my analysis of compound supply chain pressures in July, the Copperbelt situation illustrates with unusual clarity how multiple independent disruptions can amplify each other in ways that no single risk model captures. The Hormuz closure is the primary shock, but it has been compounded by events on the ground in Zambia and along the region's road and port infrastructure.
Zambia imposed an outright sulfuric acid export ban in September 2025 after domestic inventories fell to levels threatening its own copper producers. First Quantum Minerals' country director Anthony Mukutuma confirmed that domestic stocks had reached depletion levels where there was effectively no capacity to export. On March 27, 2026, Zambia's Ministry of Commerce replaced the ban with a permit-based export control system, citing a critical market imbalance in domestic availability. Partial easing followed in May, when Commerce Minister Chipoka Mulenga confirmed that Chambishi Copper Smelter and Mopani Copper Mines had been authorized to resume limited acid shipments to Congo, alongside a 5,000 metric ton authorization for chemicals trader Alliswell Investment Limited. The minister left open the possibility of wider permissions if supply conditions continue to improve, though an industry source noted that Mopani had yet to receive its actual permit.
The logistics situation is compounded further by the collapse of the Kasumbalesa Bridge on March 3, 2026, after heavy flooding. That bridge is a critical artery south of the Zambian border, and its loss has cut off approximately one-third of the DRC's outbound refined copper shipments, leaving thousands of trucks stranded. The simultaneous disruption of the DRC-Zambia road corridor and Tanzania's primary export port has squeezed the Copperbelt from both the input supply side and the export logistics side at once. Inspection bottlenecks and diesel supply constraints from the Hormuz closure continue to restrict the trucking backhauling process that links cobalt exports to sulfur imports. Saudi Arabia has offered a partial workaround through shipments via the port of Yanbu, though flows remain irregular. India has also found new trade partners, including Brazil and Chile, shifting some marginal supply, but these routes do not come close to replacing Gulf volumes for southern African buyers.
Goldman Sachs assessed in April that DRC producers held two to three months of acid inventory at that point, but warned that if supply-chain delays extended beyond late May through June, the country could curtail approximately 125,000 tonnes of copper production in 2026. That assessment was made before the ARECOMS platform failure added a second, distinct export constraint on cobalt. The International Copper Study Group revised its 2026 copper market balance multiple times across the spring, reflecting the difficulty of modeling a disruption with this many simultaneous moving parts.
Official Reassurance, Analyst Caution, and the Legal Dimension
The DRC Mines Ministry's official position, stated by senior official Grace Mabaya to Reuters on July 6, is measured. "At this stage, we have not observed any major impact on national production related to the supply of mining inputs," Mabaya said, adding that most miners hold long-term supply contracts, maintain strategic inventories, or are sourcing alternatives. The ministry described the overall outlook for the rest of 2026 as broadly positive. Q1 2026 export data supports that framing: the DRC exported 823,887 metric tons of copper in the quarter, up 4.8 percent year-on-year, and cobalt hydroxide exports soared 24.5 percent to 51,940 tonnes.
Analysts are more cautious about the second half of the year. Goldman Sachs' 125,000 tonne DRC curtailment scenario was conditional on supply delays extending past May or June, and the acid market has not normalized. Wood Mackenzie identifies sulfuric acid availability as one of four operative supply constraints on copper, alongside treatment and refining charge compression, trade policy, and fiscal risk. Miners in the DRC are reportedly reducing chemical consumption to stretch existing stockpiles, a measure that sustains short-term output at the cost of medium-term capacity utilization.
The legal dimension is quietly significant for anyone holding supply contracts in the region. Akin Gump's April analysis noted that producers and off-takers across Chile, Peru, the DRC, Zambia, and Indonesia are now operating long-term supply contracts in a market where the underlying supply no longer exists at contracted volumes or prices. The Zambian statutory instrument introducing the permit-based export control system may itself constitute a qualifying force majeure event under downstream supply contracts, depending on governing law and specific contract language. Host-state regulatory responses to the disruption are generating independent qualifying events, meaning parties may have grounds for suspension or renegotiation even before physical supply failure occurs. For procurement and legal teams, that is a live exposure question, not a theoretical one.
What Comes Next
The path forward depends on two variables that remain genuinely unresolved: when or whether the Hormuz sulfur backlog clears to functional trade volumes, and whether China's sulfuric acid export ban remains in place through year-end. Acuity, which first reported the Chinese ban, indicated the restriction could last throughout 2026. If both disruptions persist, Goldman's curtailment scenario and the analyst consensus around cobalt tightness become more probable than the base case of gradual normalization.
Several second-half catalysts bear watching. Zambia's willingness to expand its export permit regime will be a leading indicator of whether Congolese miners can source partial replacement volumes regionally. The resolution, or further deterioration, of the ARECOMS customs platform failure will determine whether the cobalt export risk becomes a realized export loss or an administrative problem that was fixed quietly. And Ivanhoe's performance against its tightened guidance of 290,000 to 310,000 tonnes will function as a real-time indicator of how the region's largest integrated operation is managing the acid squeeze.
The broader lesson that 2026 is crystallizing for supply chain strategists is one that the critical minerals field has discussed in theory for years: the vulnerability is rarely where you expect it. It is not in the mine or the port. It is in the chemical input, 2,000 kilometers away, arriving by truck from a port that connects to a sea lane that runs through a strait that can close. Mark Kristoff, CEO of Traxys, has projected copper reaching $15,000 per tonne within 24 to 36 months, a view that reflects growing market consensus that supply chain vulnerabilities will be priced into metal markets long after current geopolitical tensions subside. The African Copperbelt supplies over 26 percent of global copper exports. The gap between its resource potential and its supply chain resilience, as the events of 2026 are demonstrating, is wide, measurable, and increasingly consequential for every downstream manufacturer that depends on what comes out of it.