The Russian Federation Is Provided with Some Types of Strategic Minerals for No More Than 25 Years
The share of hard-to-recover reserves in hydrocarbon production is growing, according to the strategy for the development of the mineral resource base until 2050.
Russia’s provision with economically viable reserves of some types of strategic and significant minerals currently does not exceed 25 years. This follows from the strategy for the development of the mineral resource base until 2050, approved by the Russian government.
“Taking into account the economic and technological conditions for the development of mineral resources, the provision with economically viable reserves of the projected needs for a number of strategic and significant minerals for the country’s economy does not exceed 25 years,” the document says.
The strategy notes that the share of hard-to-recover reserves in hydrocarbon production is growing, the development of which using existing technologies is unprofitable due to geological and technological factors. At the same time, the quality of ores in the extraction of solid minerals is gradually decreasing and the mining conditions of the exploited deposits are becoming more complex. In addition, new deposits are being discovered in complex geological and geographical conditions.
Three groups of significant minerals
According to the strategy, all significant minerals are divided into three groups. The first group includes raw materials, the reserves of which will satisfy the needs of the Russian economy until 2035 under any scenario of its development. This group includes natural gas, helium, coal, copper, nickel, cobalt, platinum group metals, iron ores, apatite ores, potassium salts, tin, bromine, and certain types of rare metals.
At the same time, the strategy emphasizes that for some minerals of this group there are regional deficits associated with the imbalance in the location of producers and consumers of mineral raw materials, as well as the gradual depletion of the raw material base in historical mining areas. Thus, there is a shortage of coal reserves in the European part of Russia and in the Urals, there is also a shortage of reserves for open-pit mining of especially valuable grades of coking coal.
“Iron ore reserves are being depleted in the Urals, the south of Western Siberia, and in the northwestern part of Russia. The raw material base of copper ores in the Urals is approaching exhaustion,” the document says. “The absence of large metallurgical and other mineral processing industries in the east of the country is one of the reasons for the predominantly export orientation of mining enterprises in the Far East.”
The second group includes minerals whose achieved production levels are insufficiently provided with reserves for the period up to 2035: oil, gas condensate, gold, silver, diamonds, lead, zinc, antimony, and highly pure quartz raw materials. For this group, according to the strategy, the most important task is to identify large deposits, including unconventional ones, which requires the use of fundamentally new methods for their forecasting, exploration, and evaluation.
The third group includes import-dependent scarce minerals, the domestic consumption of which is largely provided by imports. It includes uranium, chromium, titanium, bauxite, molybdenum, tungsten, lithium, beryllium, zirconium, niobium, tantalum, rare earth metals, rhenium, graphite, fluorspar and other scarce minerals. At the same time, Russia has explored significant reserves of almost all types of scarce minerals, the strategy notes.
