PROSPECTS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF LITHIUM ORE MINING AND PRODUCTION OF LITHIUM CONTAINING PRODUCTS IN UKRAINE

Abstract

Introduction. The further development of Ukraine and the post-war recovery of this country’s economy call for new promising and economically viable directions for the development of industries and breakthrough technologies. In recent years, the lithium industry has been developing rapidly in the world, mainly due to the shift to the use of electric cars instead of those with diesel and gasoline engines and the use of lithium batteries as an energy source, the rejection of environmentally hazardous lead-acid batteries, etc. Increased demand for lithium leads to a sharp rise in its price on world markets and makes it a strategically important material. Since Ukraine is one of the few countries in the world with large reserves of lithium ores, a possible promising direction for this country’s economy could be the development of a domestic lithium industry based on the extraction of lithium ores and the production of lithium-containing products using modern environmentally safe and cost-effective technologies.

Materials and methods. The methodological basis of the research includes the following general and special scientific methods: the dialectical method of cognition, analysis and synthesis, generalization of information, monographic research, abstraction, comparison, and statistical methods of research on digital data.

Results and discussion. The conducted studies have shown a rapid growth in recent years of demand for lithium ore concentrates, lithium and lithium-containing products in the world. According to the results of geological exploration during the USSR, Ukraine is one of the few countries in the world on whose territory are lithium deposits. According to optimistic forecasts, up to 10 % of the world's explored lithium reserves are located on Ukraine’s territory. At today's prices, this is more than $80 billion. But today, lithium is not mined in Ukraine. This is due to the uniqueness of each deposit, which have no analogues in the world. Therefore, a unique technology should be developed for selection and enrichment and then obtaining lithium-containing materials for each deposit.

The world's existing technologies for processing mineral ores involve obtaining lithium-containing materials from spodumene ores, while Ukraine’s deposits are either the difficult to enrich petalite or petalite-spodumene ones, or even tantalum, niobium, and rubidium ones. There is even a rare deposit in which lithium is found in the form of mineral kukeites. All this makes it impossible to use the technologies and equipment, which are presently available in the world to obtain lithium-containing products from Ukraine’s petalite or petalite-spodumene ores and requires developing completely new purely Ukrainian technologies, probably on the basis of hydrometallurgy and complex formation.

 The uniqueness of Ukrainian lithium deposits makes it impossible to trade in ore concentrates. That is, Ukrainian ore concentrate is not needed by anyone but us, and it will not be possible to simply trade in ore concentrate. However, this creates an opportunity to set up an entire domestic value-added chain from ore extraction to production. Therefore, based on the analysis of geological prospecting data for lithium deposits, the existing technologies for enrichment and production of lithium-containing products, and the current state of development of lithium deposits in Ukraine, the author shows the prospects and problems of the development of this industry in Ukraine.

Conclusions. The extraction of lithium ores and the production of lithium-containing products in Ukraine can become one of the priority tasks, as one of the most economically promising areas of development, providing it is carried out based on new domestic technologies, for which it is necessary to refine the existing scientific designs of Ukrainian scientists and create proper conditions for the development of lithium industry.