Judgement reserved – Too early to celebrate the lithium find

Source: The post is based on the article “Judgement reserved – Too early to celebrate the lithium find” published in Business Standard on 20th February 2023.

Syllabus: GS 1 – Distribution of key natural resources across the world (including South Asia and the Indian sub-continent).

Relevance: About Lithium reserves.

News: Recently, a vast deposit of lithium ores has been found in Jammu´s Reasi district.

What is Lithium?

About the Lithium findings

What are the applications of Lithium?

What are the issues with extracting the identified Lithium resources?

If the estimates that the Reasi deposits of 5.9 million tonnes of lithium are close to being accurate, then India possesses the largest reserves after Bolivia. However, a) the accurate estimates of proven quantity could eventually be significantly lower than the current inferred amount.

b) The extraction process could take a decade or more and require substantial investment. For instance, in 2005, Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation (GSPC) announced that it had discovered $100 billion worth of natural gas in the offshore Krishna Godavari Basin. It was hailed as a historic moment and large investments poured in over the next 17 years. But GPSC still did not achieve commercial production.

c) India should not only have to extract and refine lithium but also set up a value chain for battery production. This process of extraction, refining, and battery production will take a fair amount of investment and time.

d) The project will create a serious environmental impact and possibly require the shifting of local populations since the area is geologically “young” and seismically unstable.

e) Reasi is close to the Line of Control, which means there could be geopolitical complications.

What should be done?

The government will have to work out a comprehensive policy if the reserves are proven.

Work on sodium-ion batteries: India has always been aware that it is lacking in lithium reserves. Hence, India has invested in researching alternative storage technologies involving sodium-ion batteries. Sodium is far more abundantly available than lithium it can be extracted from seawater. There has been promising research into sodium-ion battery technologies in the laboratories of the IITs. Indian should continue and scale up it to be commercially available.

The lithium discovery is worth investigating, but that should not hurt research on alternative storage technologies.