China seeks to expand the extraction of strategic minerals from seawater
Wire desk byline Sourced from Xinhua, Dawn, Arab News, Anadolu and Minute Mirror. Translated and abridged by the GSRRA Desk.
China’s Ministry of Natural Resources on Monday released a report highlighting new progress in the country’s utilization of seawater, while also shedding light on the huge reserve of strategic minerals contained in seawater and the nation’s plans to expand the extraction of such resources through technological progress.
According to the report, China has successfully achieved kilogram-scale extraction of uranium from real ocean environments. Additionally, domestic research institutes, universities and enterprises have made breakthroughs in the fundamental theories and key technologies concerning the extraction of lithium, uranium, deuterium, and other trace elements.
Global uranium reserves in seawater are estimated at about 4.5 billion tonnes, over a thousand times the known land-based reserves.
As a strategic emerging industry, China’s seawater desalination and comprehensive utilization sector as a whole is growing steadily, the report noted.
According to Xiang Wenxi, director of the Institute of Seawater Desalination and Multipurpose Utilization located in north China’s Tianjin Municipality, China currently has 167 desalination projects with a total capacity of 3.077 million tonnes per day. Meanwhile, the annual volume of seawater used for industrial cooling purposes has reached 193.36 billion tonnes, an increase of 86.4 percent from 2020.
During the 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026-2030), China will promote the iteration of relevant technology and equipment and build up technological reserves for extracting strategic elements from seawater, Xiang said.
Reference Link:- https://english.news.cn/20260608/279a70996c094fd6ace51619d1f1edfa/c.html
Zamir Ahmed Awan is the founder and Chair of the Global Silk Route Research Alliance, a think tank in Islamabad. He studied engineering at Shanghai University in the 1980s, and years later he went back to China as Pakistan's science counsellor in Beijing, from 2010 until 2016, working on science and higher education cooperation between the two countries.…
