Qairhan Salt Lake, located in Qinghai province, is the largest salt lake in China. (PHOTO: XINHUA)

By Staff Reporters

Qinghai province, located in northwest China, is home to numerous salt lakes. One of these is Qairhan Salt Lake, covering more than 5,800 square kilometers, and boasting deposits of more than 60 billion tons of various resources, such as magnesium, potassium, sodium and lithium. However, due to its remote location, there is a relative shortage of scientific personnel to work on unlocking the salt lake's industrial benefits.

Luckily, Qinghai has managed to find a way to take advantage of its resources by implementing an open competition mechanism.

The open competition mechanism was initially put forward in 2016. Many provinces in China have adopted the mechanism, under which governments at all levels publish specific research obstacle issues submitted either by public institutions or private companies. It breaks the geographical restrictions and recruits qualified personnel across the country to solve these problems irrespective of their age, educational qualifications and job positions.

This mechanism gives eligible researchers and scientists more opportunities to use their expertise, and earn an income while helping remove technological obstacles.

In April 2021, Department of Science and Technology of Qinghai Province made public the first project list, which seeks breakthroughs in adaptive study of salt lake brine as raw materials and its refining.

It just took less than six months to complete all the processes, including selecting candidates and testing the feasibility of potential technologies. The project gradually succeeded in opening up the industrial chain from electrolytic metal magnesium to magnesium alloys, and overcame the challenge to dehydrate magnesium chloride.

This is a solid step taken by Qinghai to solve technical obstacles encountered in local development, and demonstrates its resolve to deepen the reform of science and technology plan management.

In 2022, another follow-up project was initiated.

As the dehydrating device upstream always ran below capacity and operated unstably, the electrolyzer was often in insufficient processing capacities, which worsened the condition of the electrolyzer and forced it to breakdown.

In addition, a large amount of sodium hypochlorite was produced in the process of trial production, which was difficult to dispose of and created major environmental problems.

In response, the Department of Science and Technology of Qinghai released a notice in November 2022, to call for solutions nationwide, to resolve the technological challenge of electrolyzing the anhydrous magnesium chloride in a salt lake.

Currently, Qinghai is accelerating the building of a world-class salt lake industrial base. The province has combined its actual needs with the open competition mechanism, which will help enhance the utilization of magnesium resources and advance the construction of the industrial base.