More promising than oil. Russia has relied on other raw materials

MOSCOW, April 19, Vladislav Strekopytov. Russia has significant reserves of almost all strategically important metals, but is critically dependent on their imports. About why such a paradoxical situation has developed and what prevents you from using your own resource potential — in the article .

Legacy of the Soviet model

The Soviet Union was fully provided with all types of mineral raw materials. However, after the collapse of the country, many deposits and mining and processing enterprises remained outside of Russia — in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and the Central Asian republics.

In addition, since the mid-1980s, the focus has been on the extraction of oil and natural gas to the detriment of other types of raw materials. Foreign exchange earnings from the export of hydrocarbons for several decades solved the problems of the Soviet, and then the young Russian economy. The funds received were spent on the purchase of imported food and consumer goods. Industry, meanwhile, was in decline.

In December 1991, the federal department responsible for the creation and maintenance of the mineral resource base, the USSR Ministry of Geology, was abolished. It was replaced by the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources of the RSFSR (later — the Ministry of Natural Resources and Ecology of Russia), which manages environmental management.
In subsequent years, the state paid attention only to hydrocarbons. Some of the most profitable commodities—gold, platinum group metals, nickel, phosphate and potash fertilizers—have been taken over by private businesses. The rest was bought abroad. It turned out that this is more profitable than developing our own deposits. Moreover, the internal needs were small.

Critical dependency

However, over time, it became clear that the aviation, space, defense industry, electronics and automotive industry cannot be developed without its own raw material base of metals.

At the beginning of 1996, out of 29 types of mineral raw materials classified by the government as strategically important, 15 reached the endowment — oil, natural gas, gold, copper, nickel, lead, molybdenum, tungsten, tin, zirconium, cobalt, platinoids, silver, diamonds and especially pure quartz raw materials. The remaining 14 species — uranium, manganese, chromium, titanium, bauxite, tantalum, niobium, scandium, beryllium, antimony, lithium, germanium, rhenium and rare earth elements of the yttrium group — were completely or partially imported.
Over the years, the situation worsened. In connection with the development of new technologies, the demand for certain metals increased significantly, and the reserves of deposits discovered and explored back in Soviet times were depleted. Dependence on foreign suppliers has become critical, especially after the imposition of economic sanctions.
In August 2022, the government approved a new list of the main types of strategic mineral raw materials — already from 61 positions. Added helium, graphite, rubidium, cesium, indium, gallium, hafnium, vanadium, apatite ores, potassium salts, fluorspar, all 17 rare earth elements, as well as groundwater. For some — manganese, chromium, titanium, lithium — today the dependence on imports reaches one hundred percent.
In accordance with the instructions of the President, the Ministry of Natural Resources prepared in March a draft strategy for the development of the mineral resource base of Russia until 2035. It contains two scenarios. The base one, according to which the availability of reserves and the extraction of minerals remains at the current level with a slight increase, and the target one, the task of which is to meet the growing demand for minerals necessary for the development of industry.

The document notes that in order to implement the strategy, the main emphasis should be placed on «increasing the pace of state exploration of scarce raw materials, such as manganese, uranium, chromium, titanium and tungsten.»

Demand creates prey

Even in the previous version of the strategy, approved in 2018, it was noted that some Russian deposits of scarce minerals (chromium, rare earth metals) are not inferior in size and quality of ores to foreign counterparts, «which makes the development and application of special mechanisms to stimulate their development especially relevant «. Five years have passed, the situation with the provision of own raw materials has not changed much, and import dependence has become even more acute.

Experts talk about the complex nature of the problem. On the one hand, the existing reserves of rare and rare earth metals (REE) are not developed due to lack of demand on the part of domestic producers, who do not increase volumes due to the lack of demand for Russian products.
Therefore, even what could be produced domestically , are imported from China and other Southeast Asian countries. This leads to an even greater backlog of Russia in the areas of microelectronics, computer technology, renewable energy — industries in which the demand for REE in the world has increased by about ten times over the past 15 years.
In order to break the vicious circle, in June 2022, the president instructed the government, with the participation of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the state corporation Rosatom and other interested organizations, to «develop and implement a set of priority measures to create demand for domestic solid minerals, including rare and rare earth metals , titanium, lithium, manganese, beryllium, tantalum, tungsten, in certain critical sectors of the economy.» We are talking about the full production cycle — from raw materials to the final product. «2.002941176470588» data-crop-width=»600″ data-crop-height=»1202″ data-source-sid=»rian_infographics» class=»article__infographics-image-mobile lazyload» lazy=»1″ />

«There is a severe shortage»< /h3>In mid-April 2023, the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences held a meeting on the development of Russia's raw material base. Scientists noted that the presence of own mineral resources is an important component of security, since they form the material basis of the real sector of the economy. At the same time, not a single large ore deposit has been discovered in the country since the early 1990s, so in the foreseeable future one can only count on the backlog of the Soviet period. Academician Nikolai Bortnikov emphasizes, “But if some — nickel, cobalt, platinum group metals, gold, light rare earth metals — are not critical, then for some of the Big Six metals, such as aluminum, chromium and manganese, there is an acute shortage. quality bauxites, titanium ores, lithium».
In terms of the resource potential of all critical metals, Russia is among the top ten among the countries of the world — and sometimes even the top five. But many domestic deposits have a low quality of ores compared to foreign ones. A significant part is located in hard-to-reach areas with poorly developed infrastructure. All this increases the risks and does not contribute to the development.
“A distinctive feature of modern industry is the widespread use of rare and rare-earth metals,” says Bortnikov. “As a rule, they do not form their own deposits, but are produced as by-products during the deep processing of basic metal ores. The evaluation of deposits is not always taken into account.»
Often, in order to extract associated REEs, it is necessary to develop complex technological schemes. While they are gone, rare and rare-earth metals are simply stored in mines and combines in tailings.
So, at the deposits of the Khibiny massif on the Kola Peninsula, together with apatite-nepheline ores used to produce phosphorus fertilizers, about 120 thousand tons of rare earth metals are annually extracted, which are dead weight. For comparison: China, the main producer of REM in the world, produced 210 thousand tons in 2022. At the Chelyabinsk Electrometallurgical Plant, where molybdenum ores are processed, another extremely valuable impurity metal, rhenium, is also being lost, which is necessary for the production of high-strength rocket alloys.
assessment of reserves in the bowels to obtain the final high-tech products. And this is impossible without long-term planning and serious public investment.