Nation to up mining of nonferrous metals

China aims to increase domestic mining of nonferrous metals, especially strategic minerals like copper, aluminum, nickel, lithium and platinum group metals, the country's top industry regulator said on Friday.

This represents China's latest push to buoy the development of its nonferrous metals industry.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and six other ministry-level departments said in a plan that China aims to increase the output of the nonferrous metals industry by about 5.5 percent year-on-year this year and by more than 5.5 percent in 2024.

China will also draw up a road-map for the development of key resources such as lithium, and will encourage areas with favorable conditions to carry out key technology research and industrial trials like efficient lithium and magnesium extraction from salt lakes, the plan said.

The plan also said efforts will be made to guide nonferrous metal resource development and smelting enterprises to sign long-term procurement agreements with downstream users, in order to stabilize the supply of key products like copper, aluminum and lithium so as to prevent significant price fluctuations and unfair speculation.

China will increase the national reserves of important nonferrous metals and improve the regulatory mechanism of the national reserve market, the plan stated.

With focus on fields like new energy vehicles, new-generation information technology, aerospace, energy conservation and carbon reduction, more efforts will also be made in the research and development and industrialization of high-end materials like ultrahigh purity metals and high-quality semiconductor materials.

Data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology showed the industrial output of the nonferrous metals industry increased by 5.9 percent year-on-year in the first seven months of this year, 2.1 percentage points higher than the average growth rate of China's overall industrial economy.

Strategic minerals like lithium are widely used in making batteries for new energy vehicles. In July, 780,000 NEVs were sold in China, up nearly 32 percent year-on-year, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.

In the first seven months of this year, 4.53 million NEVs were sold, up nearly 42 percent year-on-year.

Chen Shihua, deputy secretary-general of the CAAM, said 9 million NEVs may be sold in China this year, which will further drive the demand for lithium.

A recent McKinsey report said China is one of the world's leading lithium mining hubs, the other two being Australia and Latin America.

Global demand for lithium is expected to rise from 500,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate equivalent in 2021 to some 3 million tons to 4 million tons in 2030, McKinsey said.

McKinsey said it expects the continued growth of lithium-ion batteries at a compound annual growth rate or CAGR of about 30 percent over the next decade.

Lin Boqiang, head of the China Institute for Studies in Energy Policy at Xiamen University, said although the element lithium is not a scarce in nature, its extraction and refinement take time, and a lithium project can take about a decade from building factories to seeing final products.