LOCKED TREASURE

INDIA'S BATTERY MANUFACTURERS IMPORT LITHIUM AND LITHIUM-ION FROM NATIONS SUCH AS HONG KONG, INDONESIA, MALAYSIA, SINGAPORE, JAPAN AND SOUTH KOREA WITH NATIONS TRYING TO ACHIEVE THEIR NET-ZERO GOALS, LITHIUM HAS BECOME A KEY METAL AS THE FOCUS SHIFTS TOWARDS ELECTRIC VEHICLES | THE DISCOVERY OF A 5.9 MILLION TONNE LITHIUM RESERVE PUTS INDIA IN THE TOP 10 COUNTRIES WITH RESERVES OF THE METAL THE LITHIUM RESERVES IN J&K ARE CATEGORISED AS PRELIMINARY EXPLORATION. THE NEXT STEP IS TO ESTIMATE THEIR SHAPE, SIZE AND GRADE

- NIDHI SINGAL

ON FEBRUARY 10, 0 2023, when the Geological Survey of India announced. the 'discovery' of lithium ore in Jammu & Kashmir, the whole country celebrated. After all, lithium is the fuel behind the fuel (batteries) of electric vehicles, smartphones and any other type of device that uses a rechargeable battery today. And India is importing most of its requirements from, guess who? China, of course. So, now, we have lithium in our own country! We can make our own batteries, save on our import bill, and do a lot of other things.

Well, don't pop the champagne just yet. For one, the lithium found in J&K was actually first discovered in 1999. And even though it is used in industries like speciality chemicals, glass, etc., India has continued to import the soft metal because mining it domestically is very capital intensive and not entirely profitable. Well, those caveats still exist, even though the exponential rise in demand would surely soften them. But the bigger challenge now is that of time and money-time that would be needed to first understand how much of the reserves can be commercially mined, and then the time it'll take to get to the mining stage; and the bagfuls of money that would need to be pumped in to build a completely new ecosystem of industries to leverage the metal.

Often called 'white gold', lithium has emerged as a priority metal for India given its ambitious target of achieving 30 per cent sales of EVS, along with increasing nonfossil fuel energy capacity to 500 gigawatt by 2030. "India's annual lithium-ion battery market is expected to grow to 116 GWh (gigawatt hour) by FY30, from 2.6 GWh in FY21, with EVS accounting for 90 percent of the market-according to a report by JMK Research & Analytics and Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis," says Prahalathan Iyer, Chief General Manager for Research & Analysis at India Exim Bank.