In the electric-vehicle business, the quandary is known as the nickel pickle. To make batteries for EVs, companies need to mine and refine large amounts of nickel. The process of getting the mineral out of the ground and turning it into battery-ready substances, though, is particularly environmentally unfriendly. Reaching the nickel means cutting down swaths of rainforest. Refining it is a carbon-intensive process that involves extreme heat and high pressure, producing waste slurry that’s hard to dispose of. The nickel issue reflects a larger contradiction within the EV industry: Though electric vehicles are designed to be less damaging to the environment in the long term than conventional cars, the process of building them carries substantial environmental harm.
The challenge is playing out across Indonesia’s mineral-rich islands, by far the world’s largest source of nickel. These deposits aren’t deep underground but lie close to the surface, under stretches of overlapping forests. Getting to the nickel is easy and inexpensive, but only after the forests are cleared. One Indonesian mine, known as Hengjaya, obtained permits five years ago to expand its operations into a forested area nearly three times the size of New York City’s Central Park. The mine’s Australian owner, Nickel Industries, said that rainforest clearing in 2021 caused greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 56,000 tons of carbon-dioxide. That’s roughly equal to driving 12,000 conventional cars for a year, according to calculations by The Wall Street Journal based on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data. “Unfortunately, land clearing is required for all open-cast mining processes, including our operations,” said the firm’s sustainability manager…. The negative impact is offset, he said, by nickel’s use in environmentally friendly batteries…Auto executives worried about having enough nickel to meet rapidly growing demand for EVs. They had moved away from cobalt, another battery component, after human-rights groups and journalists reported on widespread child labor in cobalt operations and dangerous conditions faced by miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Automakers tweaked their batteries to reduce cobalt by adding more nickel…
The nickel rush has created pressing new environmental concerns. The HPAL process used to process nickel pioneered by Chinese companies involves dousing nickel ore in sulfuric acid and heating it to more than 400 degrees Fahrenheit at enormous pressures. Producing nickel this way is nearly twice as carbon-intensive as mining and processing sulfide nickel found in Canada and Russia. Another way of processing laterite ore that often uses coal-powered furnaces is six times as carbon-intensive, according to the International Energy Agency. Companies also face questions about how to get rid of the processing waste. It is difficult to safely sequester in tropical countries because frequent earthquakes and heavy rains destabilize soil, which can cause waste dams to collapse. A 2018 Indonesian law allowed companies to obtain permits to discard mineral processing waste into the ocean….
China’s domination of Indonesian nickel processing poses risks for Western electric-vehicle companies at a time of fraying relations between Washington and Beijing. Last year, the U.S. government declared nickel a critical mineral whose supply is vulnerable to disruption, with very limited nickel production operations in the U.S.
Excerpts from Jon Emont, EV Makers Confront the ‘Nickel Pickle’, WSJ, June 5, 2023