Coal, the world's leading energy source and East Africa's foremost energy source, still held an unshakable hegemonic position.
After the annexation of Angola and Mozambique, East Africa's coal reserves rose further. Tete City in Mozambique was an important coal-producing region, and it lay right beside the Central Industrial Zone and Lake Malawi Industrial Zone, the two areas with the densest concentration of heavy industry in East Africa. Thus, the reason for building the Zambia River Railway—namely, the Quelimane City–New Frankfurt City railway—through Tete was self-evident.
Compared with other major countries by land area, East Africa's coal reserves were relatively limited. Tsarist Russia, the United States, the Far East Empire, and Britain—including Canada, Australia, and India—were all major coal powers, with only Brazil possessing relatively little.
However, the quality of East African coal was quite remarkable by global standards, and coal quality had an enormous impact on industry.
For instance, the secret that allowed Germany to surpass Britain in steel production capacity—the Thomas steelmaking process—improved coal utilization through technological means.
In 1877, the British Thomas and Gilchrist invented the Thomas steelmaking process. Germany itself, as well as the iron ore regions of Alsace and Lorraine regions after the Franco-Prussian War, was dominated by phosphoric iron ore. For a long time, it had been unable to solve the problem of dephosphorization, resulting in high costs that severely affected steel output.
By adding lime to the Bessemer converter, the Thomas steelmaking process solved the dephosphorization problem. The spread of this technology allowed German steel capacity to achieve leapfrog growth. In 1879, Germany widely adopted the technology in steel production, solved the dephosphorization issue, and further modified it, greatly reducing production costs.
East Africa's utilization rate for coal was relatively low. After all, East African coal quality was an entirely different matter from Germany's,