Russia's Rosnedra touts economic benefits of BRICS countries joining forces on mining costs
MOSCOW. July 22 (Interfax) - BRICS countries joining efforts to work on the cost of mining solid mineral resources could have huge benefits for these countries' economies, the head of Russia's Federal Mineral Resources Agency (Rosnedra), Yevgeny Petrov said.
"BRICS has been joined by genuinely key countries that are monopolists for a huge list of mineral resources, both in terms of the mineral resource base and mining, and in terms of exploration, mining and processing technologies. And the consolidation of efforts on working with the production cost of raw materials will have a huge economic effect," Petrov said after a roundtable on the outlook for cooperation between BRICS countries on the study, development and sustainable use of mineral resources.
"It is the new platform [the nascent BRICS Geological Platform] that will make it possible to use the accumulated potential of geological services to discover new deposits and use the best mining technologies. And, most importantly, train new personnel and develop a common expert community," he said.
"The collective West is beginning to promote a so-called service model, where the end consumer dictates the price of raw materials. For mining countries this, of course, is absolutely unacceptable. And here mining countries must in any case establish an agenda for the use of their own resource base that is beneficial for them," Petrov said.
He said solid mineral resources can be divided into two groups: liquid and critical. In mining of the former, there is healthy competition and whoever has a better resource base wins. But for critical minerals, leadership is determined only be technology.
"In critical [minerals], there is competition not in terms of 'there is a resource base or there is not,' but in terms of the existence of and access to technologies. Basically, it is technology that will determine the cost of the end product and its competitiveness. Here it is the countries that have technologies in the area of processing that will essentially be monopolists. Therefore, within the context of the BRICS countries it is important for us to ensure access to the best technologies so that mining countries can use their resource base for the benefit of the development of their own economies," Petrov said.
He said one of the main priorities in the creation of the BRICS Geological Platform is to share know-how.
"The speed of technological changes is so great that probably no one country can respond to these changes so quickly today, providing the necessary and economically acceptable mineral resources. Only together, exchanging experience, technologies and knowledge, is it possible to quickly respond to global challenges. Obviously, every country will have its own economic interests, but the base, namely the fundamental geological one, will be common," Petrov said.