that's quite a sizeable market for China. Russia's population is 140 million. if European products were to vacate this market China certainly will gobble up most of it. there may also be a secondary effect of Chinese product's popularity being projected out to other former soviet states especially in central asia, where Russians tend to be wealthier.
Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and Global South strategic cooperation
- Thread starter Strangelove
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yep, time for China to get in there. Btw, they don't have the second largest reserves. Argentina and Bolivia all have larger reserves than Chile. Aside from that, Afghanistan is said to have huge lithium reserves. It's not as rare as people make it out to be.
On the other hand, Lithium mines need a lot of investment to extract. That's where China can come in and help.
Iran indeed has the 2nd largest reserves after Chile if the quotation from MIMT is accurate.
I have made a post regarding the subject when India reported its recent finding. The issue is the misunderstanding of "reserve" and "resources". Reserve is what can be extracted economically with today's technology. Resources is what is there in earth but economically or environmentally forbidden to be extracted (a pie in the sky). Bolivia and Argentina have the 1st and 2nd resources, but Chile has the 1st reserve at 9.2 million tones. Iran's 8.5 million would be the 2nd.
The article quoted from MIMT as
According to a senior official of the Iranian Ministry of Industry, Mine, and Trade (MIMT), the lithium deposits could contain some 8.5 million metric tons (MT) ready for extraction, which would make it one of the largest global discoveries.
Ready for extraction is reserve.
I don't know how they measure these things, but Bolivia and Argentina are both considered to have more. This is as of 2020
Of course, regardless of the rankings, this is a large reserve and China will definitely be interested.
The other thing that Iranians have that is also very important to batteries is copper. They have a lot of it.
They also have some amount of iron ore
Makes a lot of sense since Afghanistan is said to have a lot of these resources and they are next to each other.
Given the geography, some lithium deposits would be expected. But considering Iran's tendency for hyperbole, the numbers they report are almost certainly exaggerated.
But diversifying lithium suppliers is a good idea in any case. It's also positive because it moves the relationship away from oil and gas, which is where more stigma from sanctions comes from
The article stated resource. It takes the data from USGS.
Here is the 2021 USGS report. You can see that Argentina has only 1.9 million reserves but 19.3 million resources.
Definition of resource and reserve can be find here.
You can see that reserve is readily extractable by industry, while resource is only possible.
Resource. —A concentration of naturally occurring
solid, liquid, or gaseous material in or on the
Earth's crust in such form and amount that
economic extraction Of a commodity from the
concentration is currently or potentially
feasible.
Reserve Base. —That part of an identified resource
that meets specified minimum physieal and
chemical criteria related to current mining and
production practices, including those for
grade, quality, thickness, and depth. The
reserve base is the in-place demonstrated
(measured plus indicated) resource from which
reserves are estimated. lt may encompass
those parts Of the resources that have a
reasonable potential for becoming economically
available within planning horizons beyond
those that assume proven technology and current
economics.
Of course higher resource is always desirable because eventually it may make economical sense to extract them once the reserve runs dry.
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I see what you are saying, but that's pretty arbitrary how they determine something to be resource vs reserve. Chile has large reserve in large part because there have been tools developed to mine it. Bolivia's current Lithium resource is a little hard to mine, but that's what CATL was selected to do. That has as much to do with the gov't itself as where the Lithium resource is concentrated. Same with Argentina. And frankly, it's really not up to the us gov't to decide what can be mined and what can not be.
Note here
See it takes time to figure out how to extra lithium and our technology is improving every day. 100k t a year is a lot of lithium. So, I'm not sure how the US gov't can determine what's resource vs reserves.
So my point is that while it's nice to be able to work with Iran on Lithium, it's not that much of a game changer.
good news is the location is quite close to Tehran (300km as the crow flies). bad news is it is still quite a mountainous region. going to need to develop some good rail network before iran can reap its benefits. also since it is quite far from the persian gulf, transportation might actually be more expensive compared to lithium from South America. Iran will benefit from building its own refineries.
Chile and Bolivia are also mountainous. As I see now only Australia has the most favorable terrian to extract.