Is Russia After Ukraine’s White Gold?

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What’s happening?

Lithium powers nearly every electronic device, from phones and laptops to electric vehicles.
Lithium can pack more power per unit of weight than other metals (like nickel-cadmium) so smaller batteries can power larger devices.
Even then, a single electric vehicle could need about 8 kg lithium in its battery.
Scientists have been trying to come up with replacements for lithium-ion batteries -exploring sodium, magnesium and even jackfruit – but have not succeeded yet.
For now, it’s not exactly replaceable.
By 2040, lithium is projected to account for 90% of all clean energy technology globally and see its demand go up anywhere between 13 and 51 times.
The term rare earth, though, is a misnomer — lithium is not rare, it just occurs in such low concentrations that isolating it can be difficult.
So, its production often boils down to how much a country can invest in mining and processing.
That explains why Bolivia has the world’s largest known lithium resources (21 million tonnes) but Australia is the one with the largest production (55,000 tonnes).

The country’s researchers estimate that its eastern region has nearly 500,000 tonnes of lithium oxide.
If Ukraine indeed boasts that much lithium, it would be the sixth largest reserve in the world.
But mining and production have not started anywhere yet.
In May 2021, Ukraine said it was thinking of opening up e-auctions to grant other countries exploration permits for lithium, copper, cobalt and nickel.
By July 2021, Ukraine was in line to sign a deal with the European Union (EU) to become a major supplier of batteries.
This could have reduced EU dependency on China, which accounts for 98% of the EU’s rare earth supply.
The EU’s list had 30 critical raw materials, including lithium and titanium.

In November 2021, an Australian firm and a Chinese company had started the process to mine lithium in Ukraine, marking the white gold rush.
It was also the month it was confirmed Putin had stationed Russian troops along the Ukraine border.
Ukraine, meanwhile, had created an “Investment Atlas” of 30 critical mineral assets, including lithium, titanium, beryllium and gold.

Russia already has 1 million tonnes of lithium reserves.
So if it is going after Ukraine’s lithium, it could be simply because Putin wants it.
Rosatom, the state-backed nuclear monopoly, has been focusing on lithium and biofuels since 2014.
The target was 10% of global lithium market share by 2030.
Putin said in 2016 that rare earth production is “critical to ensuring the defence capability of our country“.
Lithium is a metal which is found in ores and has to be extracted.
That mining process depends on the kind of lithium reserves a place has.
If the ore is of the kind called spodumene, hard rock mining has to be done the drilling and blasting that usually comes to mind when you hear ‘mining’.
The other type of lithium mining is done from metallic brines – little ponds of metal-laced water left to evaporate and leave the metal’s deposits behind.
Most of Russia’s lithium is locked in spodumene. “Extracting lithium from them is more expensive than from brines.“
It does not have enough separation plants, so it ends up exporting most of its lithium.

And because global lithium prices had started dipping in 2018 (starting to recover only in January 2021), Russia had slowed down its production.
But prices are rising again – a good time to capitalise on demand.
Also, Russia’s reserves are in its difficult regions, like eastern Siberia, where it would take a lot to produce even small quantities of lithium.

Russia may or may not be considering Ukraine’s lithium reserves as its primary motivation.
But the disruption of order often cleaves open an opportunity to appropriate whatever is up for grabs, unattended.
For instance, three months after Afghanistan went into Taliban hands, China started moving in to tap its lithium reserves, which, ironically, Soviet scientists had played a huge role in identifying.

Q) Which of the following primary cells has the lowest voltage?