MOSCOW, July 29. /TASS/. Russia's supply of economically viable reserves of some types of strategic and important minerals currently does not exceed 25 years, according to 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 supply of economically viable reserves of the projected needs for a number of strategic and important minerals for the country's economy does not exceed 25 years," the document said.
The strategy noted that the share of hard-to-recover reserves in the production of hydrocarbons, the development of which using existing technologies is unprofitable due to geological and technological factors, is growing. At the same time, the quality of solid mineral ores is gradually deteriorating, and the mining and technical conditions of mined deposits are becoming more complex. In addition, new deposits are being discovered in complex geological and geographical conditions.
Three groups of significant mineral resources
According to the strategy, all significant mineral resources are divided into three groups. The first group includes raw materials whose reserves 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 emphasized that there are regional deficits for a number of minerals in this group, which are associated with an imbalance in the location of producers and consumers of mineral raw materials, as well as the gradual depletion of the raw material base in the historical mining areas.
The second group includes minerals with current production levels that are not adequately backed by reserves for the period until 2035 - oil, gas condensate, gold, silver, diamonds, lead, zinc, antimony, and high-purity quartz raw materials. According to the strategy, the most important task for this group is to identify large deposits, including non-traditional ones, which requires the use of fundamentally new methods for their forecasting, exploration, and evaluation.
The third group includes import-dependent scarce minerals, with their domestic consumption largely met by imports - 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 discovered significant reserves of almost all types of scarce minerals, the strategy noted.