Overseas tightening! The snatching of lithium resources from outside to inside

As the core material of electric vehicle power battery, the importance of lithium resource is becoming increasingly prominent. in order to grasp the voice of lithium resource, domestic enterprises begin to explore the domestic lithium resource market when they hit a brick wall overseas.

On January 28, Ganfeng Lithium Industry announced that the company and the people's Government of Haixi Prefecture in Qinghai Province recently signed a "Strategic Framework Agreement" to make use of the company's advantages in the research, development, production and sales of the whole industry chain of lithium products. strengthen the comprehensive development and utilization of lithium resources in Haixi salt lake, increase investment in lithium salt lake exploration and development, metal lithium and its supporting production capacity, lithium battery recycling and other projects, We will actively promote the formation of industrial clusters for the exploration, development and comprehensive recycling of lithium resources in salt lakes.

Ganfeng Lithium Industry, which holds many lithium concentrate resources around the world, has also returned to the origin of domestic related resources in the last few pieces of its lithium resource layout.

Before Ganfeng lithium industry, including BYD, Yiwei LiNeng, Guoxuan Hi-Tech, Xin Wanda and Ningde era and other domestic leading battery companies, have been layout salt lake resources in Qinghai.

Overseas lithium purchases are blocked one after another. Major lithium-producing countries tighten policies.

On January 12, BYD's tender for 400000 tons of lithium launched by the Chilean mining sector won a contract for a project to mine 80, 000 tons of lithium per year over a 20-year period, with a bid of about $61 million.

Before BYD could celebrate, the bid-winning project encountered an "accident".

A Chilean local court said on January 14th that it had suspended a $61 million lithium mining contract between Chile and BYD because of environmental protection and economic development. The Court of Appeal in Copiap ó, the capital of (Atacama) in Chile's Atacama province, accepted a lawsuit filed by the Atacama regional government and local indigenous communities over the mining tender and asked the Minister of Mines to submit the relevant report within 10 days.

The Ningde era, which also bought lithium overseas, experienced a similar experience.

September 2021, Ningde era and Millennial Lithium Corp. An agreement was signed to acquire a 100% stake in the company, which has two world-class lithium salt lake projects in Argentina, for C $377 million (1.93 billion yuan). But two months later, Ningde era this acquisition was the American lithium industry (Lithium Americas Corp) high price "cut off Hu", and finally abandoned.

Data show that in 2021, the sales of new energy vehicles in China continued to maintain rapid growth, with a total sales of 3.521 million new energy vehicles in the whole year, with a market penetration rate of 13.4%, an increase of about 1.6 times over the same period last year. As the core material of power battery for new energy vehicles, the demand for lithium will maintain a rapid growth trend in the next 10 years, driven by applications such as new energy vehicles and energy storage, especially in the context of rapidly rising lithium prices. the major lithium-producing countries in the world have realized the strategic importance of lithium, and the major lithium-producing countries in the world have listed lithium as a strategic resource.

Earlier this month, Chile's Constituent Assembly initially adopted a proposal submitted and adopted by the Parliamentary Environment Committee to promote the nationalization of copper, lithium and other strategic assets. This shows that the nationalization of Chilean lithium and other mineral resources has taken a key step. In December 2021, Gabriel Boric was elected the new president of Chile. Borich supports the nationalization of lithium mines and advocates the establishment of state-owned lithium mining enterprises.

According to foreign media reports, earlier, Argentina, Bolivia and Chile were discussing the establishment of an organization of lithium producing countries similar to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting countries (OPEC).

Minmetals Securities data show that the Australian lithium mine and South American Salt Lake are the main supply of lithium resources in the world. In terms of morphological distribution, global salt lake lithium, ore lithium and clay lithium account for 58%, 26% and 7% respectively; in terms of geographical distribution, Chile and Australia account for 44% and 22% of the world's proven lithium reserves, respectively.

The same thing is happening not only in South America, but also in Europe, when the Serbian government announced on January 20th that it had suspended Rio Tinto's Jadar lithium project for political and environmental reasons. Jadar is the largest greenfield lithium project in Europe. Rio Tinto revealed in an earlier announcement that the Jadar project has 2.48 million tons of lithium oxide resources and had planned to produce 58000 tons of battery-grade lithium carbonate a year.

In 2021, global sales of generalized new energy passenger vehicles will reach 9.37 million. Among them, the global sales of new energy passenger vehicles in the narrow sense of plug-in, pure electric and fuel cells reached 6.23 million, a year-on-year high-speed growth.

From a global point of view, automobile electrification is accelerating, including Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, General Motors, Hyundai, Ford, Toyota and other mainstream traditional car companies are also comprehensively transforming to electrification; domestically, China's new energy vehicles have entered a stage of accelerated development.

In this context, the controllability of strategic resources will be the key. In January this year, Guo Shougang, deputy director of the equipment Industry Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that he would enhance the guarantee capacity of key resources in the new energy vehicle industry, strengthen communication with provinces and cities such as Qinghai, Sichuan and Jiangxi, and coordinate efforts to speed up the development of domestic lithium resources.

Head enterprises have set their sights on domestic lithium resources.

On the one hand, large countries with overseas lithium resources are tightening their lithium ore development policies; on the other hand, high-quality lithium mines in major lithium resource countries such as Australia, Chile and Argentina have been locked by some enterprises. In this scenario, head battery companies have locked their attention to domestic lithium resources.

From the distribution of lithium resources in China, more than 80% of lithium resources in China exist in salt lakes, distributed in Qinghai, Tibet and other provinces, while ore lithium resources are concentrated in Sichuan, Jiangxi, Hunan, Xinjiang and other provinces (regions). According to the Qinghai Lithium Industry Patent Navigation report, 80% of China's lithium resources are concentrated in Qinghai: among them, there are 2 extra-large salt lakes with reserves of more than 10 billion tons and 6 large salt lakes with reserves of 1 billion to 10 billion tons.

Seizing salt lake lithium resources has become a common action of domestic battery industry chain enterprises.

Distribution of Lithium Resources in Salt Lake of domestic Battery Industry chain Enterprises

It is understood that BYD set up a joint venture "Salt Lake BYD" with Salt Lake shares as early as 2017, when it planned to build a battery-grade lithium carbonate project with an annual capacity of 30,000 tons, but it was unable to start work due to some formalities and process routes. With the rise in the price of lithium resources in 2021 and the high demand, the source said, "now that the early difficulties have been basically solved, we should be able to start in 2022."

Since 2021, Yiwei Lithium Energy, Xin Wanda, Guoxuan Hi-Tech and other head battery companies have also made extensive cooperation and layout in salt lake lithium extraction resources. Ganfeng Lithium Industry, which holds many lithium ore resources in the world, also extended its tentacles to Qinghai salt lake resources in January this year, which also means that the competition and development of domestic lithium resources has also entered a new stage.

In fact, in addition to the most abundant salt lake resources in China, lithium ore resources are also the focus of contention. In January this year, Yongxing material announced that the company and Ningde Times signed a "joint venture agreement", the two sides will set up a joint venture company in accordance with the agreement, involving lithium ore, lithium carbonate and other businesses. In terms of the shareholding structure of the joint venture company, Ningde Times or its related parties hold 70% of the shares; Yongxing Materials or its related parties hold 30% of the shares.

It is understood that according to the plan, the joint venture company will build 6 million tons of mining capacity (mainly contracted for some mine operations in the Ningde era), 6 million tons of mineral processing capacity and 50, 000 tons of lithium carbonate production capacity. The progress of capacity construction is to build 30, 000 tons of lithium carbonate smelting capacity in the first phase.

Since last year, battery companies such as Ningde era, Guoxuan Hi-Tech and BYD have also laid out lithium mining projects in China and directly participated in the development of lithium ore resources.