Uralmining (part of IRC) has lost its rights to the Bolshoy Seyim titanomagnetite ore deposit in the Amur Region. According to "Kommersant", the Moscow Arbitration Court and the Ninth Appellate Court upheld Rosnedra's decision to revoke the license, which was issued back in 2005. The reason is a long-term failure to meet deadlines: the launch of the mining enterprise was scheduled for the end of 2014, but work stopped due to lack of funding, and by 2024, the required 1.5 million tons of balance ore per year had not been achieved.
The balance reserves of the deposit are estimated at 293 million tons of ore, containing 22.5 million tons of titanium dioxide and 52 million tons of iron. The ore is subject to separation into ilmenite concentrate – the main raw material for smelting metallic titanium and producing titanium alloys – and titanomagnetite concentrate, used in metallurgy. The planned capacity of the mining and processing plant was to be 168 thousand tons of ilmenite and 130 thousand tons of titanomagnetite concentrates per year. Earlier, Interros and Intergeo showed interest in the project, but no real investments were made.
The key technological problem remains the composition of the ore: as Maxim Shaposhnikov, advisor to the managing director of the Industrial Code fund, explained, a full-fledged technology for extracting ilmenite from Bolshoy Seyim ores still does not exist. At low prices for titanium oxides, the development of such technology is economically unjustified. The estimated cost of organizing extraction and processing is $200–300 million (14.5–22.4 billion rubles at the current exchange rate). Experts name the Baikal-Amur Mining Corporation, which has already launched the neighboring Kuranakh deposit for 18 billion rubles, as the most likely contender for the asset.