On February 25, we introduced Eddy Kioni as a man building a copper-cobalt refinery in Lualaba on faith, technical credibility, and a podcast with 1,270 views. We asked whether anyone at DFC, EXIM, or the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was paying attention.
On March 13, Kioni lost Chemaf. The NSC and State Department applied direct diplomatic pressure on Kinshasa to deliver the asset to Virtus Minerals, a company founded by former American military and intelligence officials. The full analysis of that sequence is here. Kioni’s offer of $1.5 billion, backed by $1.2 billion in UBA financing, was superior on merit. It did not matter.
On March 31, Buenassa announced the operational launch phase of its Lualaba refinery. A site in the Kolwezi region has been approved. The scoping study is done. The government holds a golden share.
On May 19-20, Eddy Kioni walks into Washington, D.C. to speak at the Critical Materials Conference: Aerospace and Defence, hosted by Project Blue — a room of DoD procurement officials, defense-focused funds, aerospace primes, and critical minerals offtake desks. He will be making the case for cobalt metal for ammunition and cobalt superalloys for jet engines, produced on Congolese soil, under a structure in which the DRC government has equity.
This is the arc. It took six weeks.
What is now confirmed on the ground
The project has moved from concept to operational phase with the following structure in place.
A site in the Kolwezi region of Lualaba has been approved following geotechnical assessment by MET63 and Bara Consulting, with CAMI designating a senior technical official for site validation. The full scoping study is finalized.
The DRC government holds a 10% golden share in Buenassa Resources SA, granting veto power over strategic decisions affecting national interests, including employment, taxation, environmental standards, and local content. Buenassa has converted from a limited liability company to a public limited company, with a board now including government representatives.
Phase 1 targets $600 million in investment, producing 30,000 tonnes of LME-grade copper cathodes and 5,000 tonnes of cobalt sulfate annually. Ultimate capacity: 120,000 tonnes of copper and 20,000 tonnes of cobalt. Target operational date: Q4 2029.
The plant will operate without a captive mine, sourcing concentrate from existing operations where the DRC government holds equity, through commercial offtake agreements, and from artisanal mining operations meeting traceability standards through a partnership with Entreprise Générale du Cobalt.
Delphos International, a Washington-based advisory firm that works directly with the US government on development finance, is structuring the capital raise. Kioni has stated publicly that if secured, DoD offtake would cover cobalt metal for ammunition and cobalt superalloys for jet engine manufacturing.
Confidence: HIGH on the project’s operational phase launch and site approval. Confidence: MEDIUM on the Q4 2029 timeline pending financing close and feasibility study completion.
What the DC appearance means
Project Blue’s Critical Materials Conference: Aerospace and Defence is not a mining conference. It is a national security conference where mining is the subject. The agenda covers supply chain resilience, US industrial policy, and material demand for fighter jets, satellites, and drones, with a specific focus on vulnerabilities from China-centric production. The audience makes procurement decisions, deploys capital, and advises policy.
Kioni speaking there on May 19 is the moment the Buenassa thesis meets its target audience directly, without intermediaries.
The Pentagon is carrying a few months of reserves on certain critical minerals. EXIM deployed $10 billion into Project Vault. The US-DRC SPA created the Strategic Asset Reserve to unlock assets exactly like the ones Buenassa is positioned to process. The SPA’s Article XI explicitly prioritizes local beneficiation and value addition on Congolese soil.
Buenassa is the only Congolese-owned project currently building toward all four of those requirements simultaneously: US-aligned financial advisory, DoD offtake ambition, government golden share, and SPA-framework structure. The DC conference is where that alignment gets tested in front of the people who can fund it.
What the Chemaf loss actually produced
Read the full arc, and the displacement from Chemaf looks different.
Washington placed its operator at the mine. Kinshasa backed the refinery. Those are not competing outcomes. They are complementary ones if both are executed.
Owning the processing step rather than a single mine gives Buenassa leverage over the entire Lualaba copper-cobalt output chain. Any large-scale mining operation in the province that exceeds its own installed processing capacity becomes a potential Buenassa customer. That includes Virtus, which now controls Chemaf’s assets but has no independent refining infrastructure in Lualaba. The SPA’s Article XI calls for exactly this kind of downstream Congolese industrial capacity. A Congolese-owned refinery with government equity, US financial advisory, and a DoD offtake ambition is not a consolation prize. It is the downstream that the SPA framework was written to encourage.
Three questions that remain open
The $600 million Phase 1 financing has not been confirmed. Delphos is structuring the raise and Buenassa is seeking $7-8 million for a comprehensive feasibility study. Whether DFC, EXIM, a defense-focused fund, or a commodity trader anchors the capital stack is unresolved. The May 19 conference is the most direct opportunity to date to close that gap. Confidence: MEDIUM on financing confirmation before the end of 2026.
Hydrometallurgical processing is extremely power-intensive. Lualaba runs a 500MW+ energy deficit. The refinery’s energy sourcing plan has not been publicly detailed. This is the constraint that has delayed every comparable project in the Copperbelt provinces in the past decade.
The comprehensive feasibility study has not confirmed its start date. The scoping study is complete. The feasibility is the next gate between the current phase and construction.
The bottom line
In February, the question was whether Washington would notice Eddy Kioni before someone else did. In March, Washington took Chemaf. In May, Kioni walks into the room himself.
Buenassa is now a project with a site approved, a government golden share formalized, a US financial adviser engaged, and a DoD offtake ambition on the speaker agenda at the most relevant defense supply chain conference in Washington this year. That is a different company from the one introduced six weeks ago.
The financing gap remains the binding constraint. The May 19-20 appearance is the most consequential test of whether Washington is ready to back what the SPA says it wants: Congolese industrial capacity, aligned with American supply chains, built on Congolese soil.
Overall tracking: MEDIUM-HIGH. The project is real. The room is right. The capital decision is next.
Ascendance Strategies tracks SPA-aligned investment developments and downstream industrial capacity across the US-DRC Strategic Partnership. Contact us to discuss implications for your position.
Washington. Paris. Kinshasa.