Surrounded by vast stretches of desert and sand dunes, a cluster of lakes sit serenely in the heartland of the Qaidam Basin, a hyper-arid basin located in the northwest of Qinghai Province.

These landlocked lakes furnish China with a major vault of mineral resources. Data have shown that, at the end of 2021, the basin's total reserve of potassium-based salts amounted to 778 million tons, which accounts for 75 percent of the domestic reserve.

The mining of mineral salts in the area dates back to the 1950s. Flash forward seven decades and, now, Qinghai has grown into China's largest manufacturing hub for potassium fertilizers. The province boasts an annual output of 8 million tons of potassium fertilizers, more than half of the country's total output.

The rise of Qinghai as a major industrial base for minerals has been powered by a series of technological breakthroughs. Over recent decades, the province has invested much energy into developing its own unique set of core technologies. Now, Qinghai is home to the world's only project that uses salt lake-derived mineral content to collect magnesium, which was once considered an unwelcome byproduct of the extraction of potassium. The project's turning of this byproduct into a valuable raw material speaks volumes about China's commitment to environmentally friendly development.

(Outlook Weekly, June 26)