Uranium One Group, an entity of Russian state nuclear company Rosatom, and the Bolivian state company Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB) plan to build a lithium carbonate mining and production complex in Potosí Department, Bolivia.

The companies signed a framework agreement late last week, under which they intend to extract lithium from the Pastos Grandes salar using Russian direct sorption technology. Rosatom claims this direct lithium extraction (DLE) tech “has already proved to be highly cost-efficient and environmentally friendly.”

The joint Russian-Bolivian project will create a complete production chain – from mining lithium raw materials to delivering a marketable product – in Bolivia, “the country with the richest lithium reserves in the world,” adds Rosatom.

“For us, this is the first large-scale foreign project in the field of lithium production, with investments of about $600 million,” says the company’s first deputy director of development Kirill Komarov. “It is planned to build an industrial complex with a capacity of 25,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate per year to be expanded based on the results of geological exploration activities. We share the Bolivian interest in the early commissioning of the first stage and the start of production of finished products.”

As part of the agreement, Rosatom will provide training of qualified personnel to develop what it calls a high-tech industry, Kallanish notes.

In February, Rosatom presented its strategy to produce batteries for electric vehicles, which will be implemented in two stages. By the end of 2023, a research and production centre for energy storage systems will be launched in Moscow at the site of the Technopolis Moscow Special Economic Zone (SEZ). The production capacity will be 320 megawatt-hours.

The second stage, from 2023 to 2025, provides for the construction of a gigafactory in Kaliningrad with a total capacity of 4 gigawatt-hours. This amount should be enough to produce 50,000 electric cars a year.