"Irkutsk Oil Company" has launched industrial extraction of lithium from formation waters at its own fields. Marina Sedykh, co-founder of INC, stated at the "Oil Capital" forum that the company became the first in the world to successfully extract lithium from brines. The extraction rate is currently below planned targets.
The license for extraction was obtained by INC's structure - "Irkutsk Chemical Company" - at the V.I. Kokorin field of industrial underground waters in the Irkutsk region. The approved reserves of the site are 17 thousand cubic meters per day. In total, the state balance includes four lithium-containing water deposits with total reserves of 32.3 thousand cubic meters per day.
The key competitive advantage of the method is that the infrastructure of oil and gas fields is already built, and no capital costs are required from scratch. American ExxonMobil and Chevron have publicly announced plans to develop the same direction, but no specific project has been launched. Lithium is included in the list of strategic types of mineral raw materials in Russia - now the country has an operating industrial production, which no one else has.