RUSSIA is to speed up plans to produce its own lithium, said Reuters in a report on Friday (2 February) citing the comments of Vladimir Putin, the country’s president.
Russia has large lithium reserves, estimated at about one million tons by the US Geological Survey (USGS) in 2024. The metal is crucial for the production of high-capacity electric batteries, and other critical minerals, including rare earths.
But it had relied on imports until they were disrupted by Western sanctions imposed over the conflict in Ukraine, prompting Moscow to press ahead with development of its own deposits, said Reuters.
“We still do not mine lithium. And how can we develop without it? But we can do it. And we could have done it 10 or 15 years ago,” Putin told a conference on advanced technologies in Moscow.
Russia, which aims to stop importing lithium and other rare metals by 2030, estimates it has 3.5 million tons of lithium oxide reserves. Russian forces are also closing in on one of the biggest lithium deposits in Ukraine.
Following Putin’s remarks, Russia’s Natural resources ministry said Russia in 2023 mined 27 tons of lithium as a byproduct at an emerald deposit in the Urals mountains.
Global attention to reserves of critical minerals has been heightened by US President Donald Trump’s proposal to Ukraine to cede control of 50% of its critical minerals, including graphite, uranium, titanium and lithium.
The fortunes of lithium, however, have slumped in recent times.
“Both the nickel and lithium markets look likely to remain substantially in oversupply until the end of the decade,” Wood Mackenzie analyst James Whiteside told Bloomberg News in a recent article. “A lot of producers are burning cash, so any non-essential spend will remain curtailed.”
The lithium price is down more than 80% since 2022 while nickel has halved since the start of 2023.
Prices of lithium have failed to rebound from a crash caused by softer electric vehicle demand and oversupply as miners have brought rapid production online since 2022, said Bloomberg News. Several miners have curtailed output, shuttered mines, and paused investment on expansion projects in the past 12 months, it said.
