Russia has its own lithium deposits, the estimated volumes of which are estimated at five million tons, but our country has never really developed them, preferring to purchase critical raw materials abroad. Writes Sergey Savchuk
During a speech in the Federation Council, Deputy Director of the Department of Metallurgy and Materials of the Ministry of Industry and Trade Vladislav Demidov announced very unpleasant news – Chile and Argentina stopped the shipment of lithium raw materials in the interests of Russian enterprises.
The cessation of supplies is a really unpleasant event and can have tangibly painful consequences for our country, potentially capable of undermining a number of key industries, where Russia occupies an unconditional leading position.
Let’s start, as usual, with the simplest educational program.
In its evolutionary development, humanity has been inextricably linked with the mining and processing of metals. From the school bench, we remember the copper, bronze and iron periods, the duration of which was measured in centuries. Throughout them, our distant ancestors got acquainted, studied and more and more skillfully processed the mentioned metals and alloys with them, promoting progress and simultaneously improving the overall quality of life. If we extend the line of evolutionary analogies, then lithium, no doubt, will receive the title of the metal of the XXI century.
For a long time, soft and malleable metal was not in great demand, but everything changed at the turn of the millennium, when the thermoelectric properties of lithium were discovered and tested on an industrial scale. Lithium sulfide, along with copper sulfide, has become an integral part of the production of semiconductors for thermoelectric converters (thermocouples), as well as chemical storage and current sources. It is from lithium that anodes are made for batteries of all types and galvanic cells with a solid electrolyte. It was not without it in the usual alkaline batteries, lithium hydroxide made it possible to triple the resource of their work and increase the initial capacity by more than twenty percent.
Needless to say, each of us is surrounded by modern devices with batteries, without which we cannot imagine our modern life. In addition, lithium is conquering ever wider markets, leaving the framework of mobile phones and, for the time being, little-known electric cars, turning into power sources for such exotic equipment as, say, underground mine loaders, that is, in places where it is critical to eliminate even theoretical spark and fire hazard.
A little-known area of application of lithium is pharmacology. For more than half a century, this metal has been used to produce psychotropic drugs used to treat complex manic and depressive disorders.
It is also in demand in heavy industry. Lithium is needed for the smelting and alloying of aluminum, increasing the ductility, strength and recovery of metals.
At the same time, there is a key industry that is very important for modern Russia, where one cannot do without the mentioned metal. We are talking about nuclear power, here lithium is the only available source of tritium production, and it is also used in the manufacture of control rods for the reactor protection system. The liquid lithium-7 isotope (alloyed with sodium or cesium) perfectly captures thermal neutrons and is rightfully considered an excellent coolant.
Russia is critically dependent on the import of lithium raw materials. Suffice it to say that in 2019, the volume of purchases of this metal amounted to more than 61 tons, of which 41 tons came from supplies from Chile and another 14 tons were added by imports from Argentina. In third place among our suppliers is China with an extremely modest figure of six tons. That is, as it is easy to understand, the demarche of the Latin American countries, which are clearly fulfilling the insistent wishes of their northern neighbor, can not only impede the expansion of the Russian presence in the global nuclear market, but also, in the medium term, call into question the reliability of the operation of nuclear reactors inside Russia itself.
The current problem has two main roots.
Firstly, the total world reserves of lithium barely exceed fifty million tons, of which ten are in Argentina, nine in Bolivia, eight and a half in Chile, China can count on seven million tons, the US has six and a half, and Australia has five million tons. If we remove countries unfriendly to us from the list and add Argentina and Chile, then it is easy to see that we are being driven into a resource trap and there are not so many ways out of it.
Secondly, the problem is that Russia has its own lithium deposits, the estimated volumes of which are estimated at five million tons, but our country has never really developed them, preferring to purchase critical raw materials abroad. Moreover, there are at least three enterprises in the country capable of setting up the industrial production of lithium and its compounds even tomorrow. We are talking about factories in Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk and the Tula region.
Underground chests with much-needed metal are not out of reach. A cluster of deposits is located in the Murmansk region, lithium has also been explored within the Kovykta natural gas field in Eastern Siberia. It has been developed by the Gazprom company for several years now, and it is from here that a large part of the gas enters the Power of Siberia pipeline. At the same time, we repeat, our own production is scanty.
However, you need to be objective and mention the fact that some progress in the development of this sector began in 2021.
In October last year, the acting head of the Federal Agency for Subsoil Use, Yevgeny Petrov, promised that 17 sites with lithium deposits would be licensed at once, and development projects would be recalculated downward, and not just, but dozens of times. It followed from the statement that the initial payment for obtaining a license to develop the Goltsovskoye field would be reduced from 75 billion to 700 million rubles, and a similar payment for the Kolmozerskoye field – from 11 billion to 200 million.
It is rather difficult to find out to what extent these promises have been implemented, because specialized publications and departments keep mysterious silence on this matter. The only implemented project is listed for the same Gazprom, which in early February of this year, through the mediation of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, concluded an agreement with the Irkutsk Oil Company for the extraction of lithium within the boundaries of the aforementioned Kovykta gas condensate field. Naturally, in such a short period of time, practical work did not even begin on the spot, and the country needed lithium, as they say, yesterday.
I would like to habitually write that there is no particular problem here and our Western partners came up with it in order to bring confusion into the minds of Russians, but this is not true. The Ministry of Industry and Trade assesses the current situation as a gigantic problem and points out that the only supply channel still working is Bolivia. At the same time, against the background of the demarche of the other two countries of Latin America, it is logical to prepare for the onset of difficult times.
Lithium is a strategic raw material, and data on its reserves are at least information for official use. And it is extremely difficult for a person who does not have access to relevant sources to objectively assess the complexity of the current situation, so we will focus on the assessment of the relevant ministry.
The situation with the supply of lithium to Russia has hung at a point of uncertainty, and it remains to be hoped that the collective Russian peasant represented by the government, ministries, the Rosatom state corporation and the Gazprom holding, as has happened more than once in our history, will get together at a critical moment and do the necessary a miracle without giving sworn friends a reason to rejoice. Fortunately, everything you need is found in our bowels – and there is enough lithium underground to meet state needs in abundance.
In the last part of our conversation, let’s allow ourselves a drop of conspiracy theories.
The fact is that there are reserves of lithium not only in the Russian North and Siberia, but also in much closer and more accessible regions. We are talking about Ukraine , where three explored deposits are located at once with a predicted volume of a useful component of five million tons. These are the Polokhovskoye deposit near Kirovograd, the Shevchenkovskoye deposit in the Donetsk region, and the Krutaya Balka mine in the Zaporozhye region. Their reserves have been estimated only approximately, but it is absolutely known that ore bodies occur at depths of about 300 meters, which, given the current level of development of mining technologies, is not at all a big problem.
It is interesting here that Krutaya Balka is located between Mariupol and Berdyansk, and the Shevchenkovskoye field is literally ten kilometers from Ugledar. The first is already in the zone of control of the republics of Donbass, and the second grouping of the NVO is only a few kilometers away. Of course, it would be foolish to think that the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces bases its plans on the geological map of the region, but the coincidence is very symbolic.
Republished from RIA Novosti
