College of Mining, NUST MISIS, Moscow, Russia:

T. I. Yushina, Head of Chair, Candidate of Engineering Sciences, Associate Professor, yuti62@mail.ru

INFOMINE Research Group, Moscow, Russia:
I. M. Petrov, Chief Executive Officer, Doctor of Engineering Sciences

Berezniki Division, Perm National Research Polytechnic University, Berezniki, Russia:
S. A. Cherny, Head of Chair, Candidate of Economic Sciences

The article focuses on definition, detection and assessment of critical metals in the world and in Russia. To start with, the authors review specific approaches to analyzing the extent of “criticality” of materials available in USA and in Europe for the purposes of the economy. It is shown that the American methodology uses two criteria (Supply Risk and Importance to Clean Energy). Each material is assessed by the criteria using the current data on production outputs, reserves, prices and consumption in industry branches as well as based on predictions of growth in demand of supply of material under analysis. It is interesting that the Supply Risk criterion involves index of Risk associated with political, social and regulatory factors within major producer countries and risk that political instability in a country will threaten mining and processing projects. The authors come to conclusion that the western procedures for the assessment of criticality of materials analyze a wide range of factors but this requires large bulk of various data, expert reports and predictions; for this reason, application of such procedures to studying the Russian market of metals seems to be complicated. The scope of this research encompassed the situation in production and consumption of all metals as well as the common compounds and alloys in Russia. Among them, the products highly dependent on import are identified (critical metals). Furthermore, the recent dynamics of import of critical metals and compounds in Russia is presented. The projects aimed to improve the market of critical metals in Russia are listed. The factors influencing potential import substitution in terms of specific products are analyzed. It is pointed at the need to consider a set of factors—availability of own basic materials, organization new metallurgical production capacities and demand level on the Russian market. In the proposed calculation procedure, the criticality coefficient is function of import deliveries in the total size of consumption and percentage of major producer (country) in the given product import.

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