The Lualaba River, which originates from the Katanga Plateau and runs through Central Africa, stimulates the economic growth of the southern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where there are abundant coal resources.
However, the “black treasure” has remained buried for years. This situation changed in July 2025 when a prospecting team from Kunming Prospecting Design Institute of China Nonferrous Metals Industry Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Aluminum Corporation of China (Chinalco), arrived.
Finding Coal
Food and weather were not the only challenges the prospecting team faced. There was no Chinese-funded company within a 100-kilometer radius of the project area. Translators were scarce, which made the language barrier between Chinese and Swahili harder to overcome than the Katanga Plateau.
The team members explained the geological work to local people through body language, poor English and Swahili, and even Chinese. For example, to gather a rock sample, an employee would even mime hammering and then point to the rock while saying the English word “sample”, in the hope that the local would understand.
Vehicles couldn’t get to the project area on the bumpy roads. The team members had to figure out a local solution. With the help of local residents, they rented a couple of motorcycles to go to the destination.
The team’s living area was not far from the work area. It consists of several shabby houses they rented for temporary office work and accommodation. But poor living conditions didn’t deter them, as the team members dedicated themselves to the tasks at hand.
“This is nothing. It’s common for anyone doing this job. What makes us different from others is just that we are far from our homeland,” said Peng Yi, a member of the team. “It is our ultimate goal that we could find a good mine for our clients.”
When the coal finally emerged from the ground, everyone on the site was excited by the outcome of their unremitting efforts.
Collecting Samples
The exploration was a struggle amid terrible circumstances. The scorching sun heated the land surface temperature to 40 degrees Celsius. Sweat streamed down their tanned faces, and they had to wear heavy protective clothing despite the extreme heat. At night, mosquitoes buzzed around and bit the watchmen. But the team members performed their duties with professional skill and devotion to the cause, whether it was day or night.
The exploration demands that every meter forward and every parameter modified must be absolutely precise because even a tiny mistake could have an unimaginable effect on the results. For more than 100 days and nights, Chinalco’s explorers carefully modified the parameters and operated the drills to penetrate the rocks.
The core storage facility was filled with rock samples. To cope with the local climate, the project team set up a rain shelter and a ventilating system for it. The samples were placed in core boxes, each tagged with clear borehole numbers, depth information, and sampling time. These samples contained key information about the coal bed’s depth, quality and structure, providing data for subsequent resource analysis and evaluation.
Drilling Well
The geological formations here are dense and hard, with tightly closed fractures and no effective aquifers, making groundwater extraction through wells highly unfeasible. For years, the lack of access to clean drinking water had led to frequent cases of illness and even death among local residents.
To address this matter, the project team volunteered to find a water source. They drilled a well that could extract 120 cubic meters of groundwater daily, offering a clean water source to the local community. Every day, local residents lined up to fetch water from the well, smiling and saying “Asante” (thanks in Swahili) to the team members.
“Despite the different languages, nationalities and races, people are connected with each other,” said Wei Zupeng, the project leader. “A bit of hardship on our part is nothing; this makes our work so meaningful.”
The project team has now returned to China, while the well is still in use, under the care of local villagers and mine managers.
After five months of hard work, the project team finally completed all the field surveys in mid-November 2025. The subsequent resource evaluation and development will be conducted on the basis of the data they collected and the conclusions they summarized. The project team adhered to their sincerity and pioneering spirit to overcome difficulties, thereby completing the missions of Chinalco explorers.
(Executive editor: Zuo Shihan)
