Hermosillo, Sonora.- Alfonso Durazo, governor of Sonora, foresees that lithium will become a growth engine for the entity, while it will encourage “a robust value chain”, which will range from its exploitation and industrial processing, to the manufacture of lithium batteries and the assembly of electric vehicles.
“I think we are in an extraordinary moment for our state… You don’t need to be a specialist to assess the potential of this mineral in the state,” Durazo said during his participation in the 14th Sonora International Mining Congress.
Despite the optimism, the official still does not have an expectation of how much the Foreign Direct Investment entity could capture, nor how much Sonora’s Gross Domestic Product could grow with this value chain.
“LitioMX has a couple of weeks of constitution, we are in a totally initial stage,” said Durazo, who is also the coordinator of LitioMX. Sonora is the headquarters of the new state company.
The governor visited the only deposit with proven reserves of this mineral, located in Bacadéhuachi, Sonora, and described the deposit as a hill framed by a strip of lithium seven kilometers long by 2.5 kilometers wide .
According to Mining Technology, it is the largest globally with reserves of 243 million tons.
On August 23, the decree by which the decentralized public body Litio for Mexico would be created, with the acronym LitioMX, was published in the Official Gazette of the Federation, grouped in the sector coordinated by the Ministry of Energy, with legal personality and assets. own.
Although President Andrés Manuel López Obrador initially said that the exploitation of lithium would be limited exclusively to the State, the position changed, and now LitioMX will collaborate with the private sector to detonate the value chain.
According to the General Criteria for Economic Policy 2023, the entire lithium value chain, which goes from the extraction of the mineral to the production of batteries and electric cars, will have a potential value of 12 billion pesos, which is equivalent to more one third of the value of the National Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Alberto Orozco, president of the Sonora Mining Cluster, said that “with a market that is just around the corner,” referring to the United States, “it makes sense to attract investment to build, if not complete electric vehicles, then some of the components”.
Today the concession of the deposit in Bacadéhuachi is in the hands of Bacanora Lithium, a company owned by the giant of Chinese origin Ganfeng Lithium, which until now has remained on the sidelines of the sector. It is not affiliated with the Mining Cluster of the entity, nor with the Mining Chamber of Mexico.
Durazo says that there is still no association between LitioMX and the Asian company, because before closing agreements or contracts with the private initiative, changes in regulatory matters are needed. “The conditions will be established in the regulations of the Mining Law,” he explains.
