RELATIONSHIP «RARE-EARTH METALS – ENERGY TRANSITION IN THE CONTEXT OF FULL CYCLE PROJECTS

Abstract

The article examines the development of the rare earth industry in Russia. Russia has a significant resource base of this type of mineral raw materials, but it does not fully use the existing potential. Russia exports semi-products of low processing, and imports goods containing rare earth elements with high added value. The key problem of the industry is the insignificant domestic demand for rare earth metals. The growing interest in the world in renewable energy sources makes new opportunities for the development of the Russian rare earth industry and gives a chance for the transition of the Russian economy to a new technological order. At the heart of the policy to create demand for rare earth products within the country, the authors propose to use a theoretic approach based on the consideration of full-cycle projects. Three main features characterize this approach. Firstly, our approach is an extension of the traditional project approach and takes into account not so much the local aspects of a separate project for the extraction and processing of ore, but its integration into the country's economy through a system of intersectoral interactions (multiplicative effects). Secondly, as the demand for products within the country grows and the scale of the use of products based on rare earth metals expands, the process of “learning” is launched - the costs of mining, processing and production of final products are reduced. Thirdly, the approach proposes to consider rare earth ores in dumps as pseudo-financial assets with the ability to manage them as traditional economic asset