OREANDA-NEWS. January 21, 2010. The Supervisory Council of RUSNANO recently approved a project to modernize and broaden production of particularly pure quartz concentrate and quartz powder for the nanoelectronic, optical, lighting engineering, and chemical industries. Under the project, a vertically integrated production complex will be established in Russia that will produce a number of base materials for these industries.

Today the market for quartz products of high purity and goods from their processing is among the world’s most promising. Unimin, an American company, is the dominant business in this field. Russia lacks its own production of sufficiently pure quartz goods, obliging domestic consumers to purchase the materials from foreign producers.

Development of the Russian lighting engineering industry and production of a wide variety of solar batteries (in part, as a result of projects that RUSNANO supports) will bring about significant growth in the market for pure quartz concentrates consumed as raw material for preparing quartz crucibles in which electronic and solar single-crystal silicon are grown.

As part of the new project, the project company will master manufacturing of quartz micro- and nanopowder and pure quartz concentrates. Quartz nanopowders, with particle size of less than 100 nanometers, have wide application in microelectronics and in construction and exploitation of oil and gas wells. Quartz micropowder, a cleaned product of pulverized natural quartz with particle size of less than 100 microns, is used as a filling medium during production of integrated circuits. Pure quartz concentrates are used in alternative energy, lighting engineering, semiconductors, and optics and fiber-optics.

The total project budget is estimated at more than four billion rubles; RUSNANO will invest 1.29 million rubles. By 2016 the volume of highly processed quartz products in this project is expected to be 10,200 tons. Revenue from sales of the products will exceed two billion rubles in 2015.

”This project holds some very important competitive advantages: Its own raw materials base in the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug-Yugra and production of a wide range of commodities. The technology for enriching pure quartz that will be used in the project was developed in partnership with leading foreign and domestic laboratories and companies specializing in processing quartz, particularly Dorfner, a Germany company that has had more than 100 years of experience extracting and processing quartz,” RUSNANO Managing Director Georgy Kolpachev noted.