The Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources (ESDM) noted that Indonesia has a nickel mine of 520,877.07 hectares (ha). The mines are spread across seven provinces, including Maluku, North Maluku, Papua, West Papua, South Sulawesi, Central Sulawesi and Southeast Sulawesi.
In 2020 the export value of Indonesia’s raw nickel ore is around $200 million. But in 2021 President Joko Widodo instituted a new ban on the export of raw ore in an effort to catalyze the domestic nickel processing industry.
A consortium of Hong Kong and European private investors are spending more than US$1 billion to revive a mothballed nickel and cobalt refinery in Australia by turning mining waste into lucrative materials for electric-car batteries.
They aim to turn the Yabulu refinery in Queensland into one of the world’s top 10 producers of refined nickel within 18 months to benefit from sustained demand and high prices for the metals, said Richard Petty, a Hong Kong-based businessman and one of the nine investors in the group.
LONDON, Jan 6 (Reuters) – March 2022 will go down in the history books as the moment the global nickel market broke down. The London Metal Exchange’s (LME) six-day suspension of nickel trading plunged the global supply chain into pricing darkness.
The LME contract is the anchor around which producers, users and traders price a spectrum of nickel products, from refined metal to ferronickel to the new stream of sulphate heading for electric vehicle batteries.
Over a decade, they’ve poured upwards of $14 billion into two ore-rich islands to lock in supplies for battery production.
ABOUT 3,000 miles south of Beijing, Chinese mining companies have set up operations in the heart of the world’s largest known nickel reserves. On the Indonesian islands of Sulawesi and Halmahera, they’ve built refineries, smelters, a new metallurgy school-even a nickel museum.
Together, they’ve plowed US$3.2 billion into the remote islands this year alone, bringing the total to US$14.2 billion in investment over the past 10 years-enough to secure their nickel supply into the next decade.
In neighboring Indonesia, nickel extraction is causing environmental and social devastation.
This March, a group of women gathered under the roof of a modest wooden shop in the Kurisa fishing village on Sulawesi, an Indonesian island east of Borneo. They held iced drinks in their hands and babies to their breasts.
It was a hot, dusty afternoon, and some of the older children were playing tag. The women were gossiping, but mostly, they talked about how there were no fish for their husbands to catch these days. “Making a living from the sea isn’t enough anymore,” said one woman. “Kurisa is dying.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government is keen to strengthen Canada’s relationship with Indonesia, but not so much so that it’s willing to join the nickel cartel that the emerging Asian power is trying to get off the ground.
“It’s an idea that Indonesia has proposed to us, but we are not looking at that particular model in the way that they have proposed,” Trade Minister Mary Ng said after she and three fellow cabinet ministers released the government’s first ever Indo-Pacific Strategy in Vancouver on Nov. 27.
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The recent decision of the panel of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Dispute Settlement Body against Indonesia’s policy of banning raw nickel export should not in any way distract the government’s focus on its well-designed strategy to develop the processing of nickel and other minerals in the country.
The government should instead appeal against the verdict of the panel which ruled in favor of the European Union’s complaint that the Indonesian raw nickel export ban imposed since January 2020 violated WTO rules.
(Bloomberg) — An Indonesian proposal to create an OPEC-like group of nickel suppliers has raised eyebrows among Australian miners.
Indonesian Investment Minister Bahlil Lahadalia floated the idea of an alliance that he said would help to unite government policies on the in-demand battery metal — and push the development of the downstream industry — at the Group of 20 Summit in Bali this week. The plan has been discussed with both Canada and Australia.
JAKARTA, Nov 16 (Reuters) – Indonesia has proposed in talks with Canada establishing an OPEC-like organisation for nickel producing countries, the Southeast Asian nation’s investment ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.
Indonesia and Canada are the first and sixth biggest nickel producers in the world, respectively. The proposal was made when Indonesian Investment Minister Bahlil Lahadalia met Canada’s International Trade Minister Mary Ng on Tuesday on the sideline of the G20 summit in Bali.
(Bloomberg) — The troubled Goro nickel mine — one of the world’s largest deposits, which is part-owned by Trafigura Group and backed by Tesla Inc. — has been forced to reduce production to address a leak from its tailings dam.
Goro, which is located in the South Pacific territory of New Caledonia, reported a “limited release of salt-laden liquid” after heavy rains in August, a spokesperson for owner Prony Resources said by email. Corrective measures required by local authorities mean that nickel output will be reduced in the fourth quarter, the company said.
World’s largest nickel producer exploring governance structure similar to that used by oil group
Indonesia is studying the establishment of an Opec-like cartel for nickel and other key battery metals, highlighting the geopolitical confidence of nations that are rich in resources needed to make electric cars.
Bahlil Lahadalia, the country’s investment minister, said Jakarta was looking at mechanisms similar to those used by Opec, the group of 13 oil-producing nations, that could be employed in the supply of metals that are central to the energy transition.
Rich nickel reserves attract Chinese investment but environmental hurdles remain
JAKARTA/MOROWALI, Indonesia — A group of fishermen and their wives looked forlorn on the porch of their stilt houses, perched on the sandy coast of Indonesia’s remote Bahodopi district.
Their homes, along with the few dozen others that make up the fishing hamlet, stood against a backdrop of towering cranes and billowing white smoke from the chimneys of Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP), a sprawling nickel processing complex in Central Sulawesi province that hosts an array of Chinese companies and their partners, led by stainless steel giant Tsingshan Holding Group.
WASHINGTON, Oct 11 (Reuters) – General Motors Co (GM.N) said on Tuesday it will invest up to $69 million and take an equity stake in Queensland Pacific Metals (QPM.AX) to secure a new source of nickel and cobalt for battery cells for use in the U.S. automaker’s vehicles.
GM said the investment will help support electric-vehicle eligibility for consumer incentives under new, clean energy U.S. tax credits. GM said the nickel laterite ore is expected to be processed using a new, proprietary process that helps reduce waste.
WAWONII ISLAND, Indonesia — The coconut palm has been a source of food and identity for centuries among the people of Wawonii Island. In the local language wawo means above and ni’i is the word for coconut — Wawonii is an island crowned by coconuts. “Now it has become a mine,” said Abdul Latif, a farmer born here in Roko-Roko village. “Wawonii should just be renamed.”
Like many areas of Indonesia’s nickel-rich Sulawesi region, Wawonii is caught in the tension between international demand for green energy and the need to preserve landscapes. Indonesia accounts for both some of the world’s largest reserves of nickel and its third-largest tropical forests.
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Nickel is unlikely to soon test its all-time high of US$50,000 a tonne reached earlier this year when a Chinese billionaire was caught in a spectacular short squeeze, but there are early signs of conditions developing which point to a price bounce.
The major issues with nickel are reliability and quality of supply, with both stoking a slow-burning fire under a metal once used mainly in the production of stainless steel but increasingly as an ingredient in batteries.
