SAIL Willing to Participate in Critical Mineral Mission: Chairman Amarendu Prakash

SAIL, the country's largest steel player, is willing to participate in the Critical Mineral Mission, which aims to secure the country's critical mineral supply chain by ensuring mineral availability from domestic and foreign sources, the company's Chairman Amarendu Prakash said on Thursday.

The Union Budget 2024-25 had proposed launching a Critical Mineral Mission for domestic production, recycling of critical minerals, and overseas acquisition of critical mineral assets.

"FM Nirmala Sitharaman announced the Critical Mineral Mission. In that mission a lot of things will be discussed, all possibilities will be discussed. So we will be watching this and seeing what opportunities are there.

"As the Critical Mineral Mission expands and things get discussed, we will be watching and seeing if there are opportunities for exploring something on SAIL's part," the Chairman told reporters on the sidelines of ISA Steel Conclave.

The Critical Mineral Mission aims to secure the country's critical mineral supply chain by ensuring mineral availability from domestic and foreign sources.

It also aims at strengthening the value chains by enhancing technological, regulatory, and financial ecosystems to foster innovation, skill development, and global competitiveness in mineral exploration, mining, benefication, processing, and recycling.

So far, SAIL has been looking at minerals which are used for steel making, the Chairman said, adding that the critical minerals segment is a separate area.

"We are not into that space (critical mineral) till now but since the government has announced a Critical Mineral Mission, we will just explore. We will look at it," he said.

Critical minerals, such as cobalt, copper, lithium, nickel and rare earths, play a crucial role in the production of clean energy technologies, from wind turbines to electric cars.

The government had earlier said that it plans to provide financial incentives for development of critical minerals, including lithium. There will also be an emphasis on securing loans from multilateral financial institutions for the development of the sector.

The government will focus on global R&D collaboration across the critical minerals value chain.

To encourage the participation of Indian public and private sector companies in the acquisition of assets abroad, the government will provide targeted subsidies for mining, and for setting up evacuation infrastructure.

Besides, there are plans to ramp up the capacity of ICVL from current 2 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) to 4.5 MTPA in three to four years.

Mozambique-based ICVL is a special purpose vehicle of SAIL, RINL, NMDC, CIL and NTPC for acquiring coal mines and assets overseas.