Blood nickel and electric vehicle batteries

Channel 7’s Spotlight did a horrific exposé recently on Indonesian nickel production. Deadly accidents on a weekly basis and horrible injuries on a daily basis was the factual claim which ought to have worried anybody with a shred of concern over worker exploitation; regardless of what they are doing and whether it’s in the developing world or anywhere else.

In December 2023, an explosion at a Chinese nickel plant on Sulawesi, one of Indonesia’s many islands, hit global news streams with 13 killed and dozens more injured. A google search as I write this in late April found another deadly accident. Two dead and one missing in a tailings dam failure, again on Sulawesi.

There is also a report of another explosion within 6 months of the December 2023 event; this time leaving two workers with burns but no fatalities. The news story on this second explosion has an updated death toll regarding the earlier explosion: 21 workers. Had this been a nuclear reactor explosion, it would have made headlines for weeks and joined the global nuclear accident folklore. But judging by the lack of news coverage, there is something clearly something relatively warm and cuddly about nickel deaths and burns that doesn’t have the mysterious alure of anything involving radiation.

At 21 deaths and dozens of injuries, the Dec 2023 accident was similar in scale to the Chernobyl accident; in which an explosion killed 2 but was followed by a fire which burned dozens of firefighters. Many also received a potentially fatal dose of radiation (29 died). If you look at the firefighters who died at Chernobyl on a case by case basis, deciding whether it was the burns or the radiation which killed them isn’t straight forward. Many had 3rd degree burns to large areas of their body, along with a potentially fatal dose of radiation.

The news hook

But there is little Australian interest in news stories about horrible events in far away places. They are usually ignored or consigned to a couple of column inches unless there is some spectacular image which will sell them to a wider audience. Even trivial events can capture a global market with a graphic piece of film footage.

The Spotlight crew used the association between nickel, batteries and electric vehicles as the hook to market their story to an Australian (and global) audience. Was that reasonable? How strong is the connection?

Enter the naysayers

Ben Sullins, a YouTuber with 300k followers, tried to dismiss the documentary as “insane lies”. I’m not sure what his problem is or who paid him, or whether it was a pro-bono assassination attempt; made for the sheer thrill of hurling insults.

But he missed.

Unfortunately, it takes plenty of effort to fact check things and Sullins speaks with incredible conviction and confidence. Plenty of people confuse confidence with competence; a recent US election comes to mind.

But maybe plenty of Sullins’ other clips are terrific; I wouldn’t know, but based on this one, I’m unlikely to ever find out.

1. Sullin’s most egregious sin is a simple lack of empathy for the very real suffering of the Indonesian workers.

2. His comparison of mining effort for renewable critical minerals and fossil fuels is incredibly silly.

3. His claim that Indonesian nickel isn’t used (much if at all) in EVs is simply false. He clearly visited a web page which references an authoritative International Energy Agency (IEA) report and provides a very clear chart. But he preferred to highlight a missing entry in an unreferenced table. Did he miss the clear and complete table or deliberately ignore it; I can’t possibly know which.

4. His deforestation segment uses a common trick. It’s an argument along the lines of “X might be bad but Y is worse, therefore any concerns about X are a beat up.”

   
   

Let’s start.

Oh, one last thing. Sullins, and many others, imply that you can’t criticise EVs or the environmental and climate impacts of building them without being some kind of climate change denier. That’s rubbish. If you understand what is required to get to net zero, you’ll understand that EVs are not sufficiently clean (low carbon) to decarbonise transport. We need a technology which is at least 90% cleaner than our current transport system. EVs are nowhere near that clean at present. 90% is a high bar, but not unreasonable. We will definitely need to couple whatever technologies we use with extensive direct air capture of carbon or geoengineering of some kind or both. Other alternatives involve much more mass transit and synthetic fuels made with clean electricity and heat; nuclear being the best but we’ll have to use less eco-friendly sources like wind and solar also. Synthetic fuels are currently wildly expensive but only they can enable us to decarbonise the existing fleet of vehicles including hard to electrify systems like large trucks.

Empathy free zone

It was hard to listen to Sullins running his line about overly emotive reporting serving to soften us up for misinformation.

“This is tragic no doubt, but of course, accidents in mining and smelting facilities isn’t unique to any one region or industry”

He's talking about an accident which killed 21 people. It's hard to be "overly" emotive about such an event. He points to Deep water Horizon, an accident 15 years ago which killed half as many people as the previously mentioned nickel plant explosion. Which was tragic of course, but it’s not like an aircraft accident, ... which is tragic of course, but not compared to 9/11, ... which was tragic of course, but not compared to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, ... which was tragic of course but not compared to … it's a common pattern.

Ranking disasters is definitely useful for allocating scarce resources and effort; but it’s morally repugnant to use it to advocate for suffering as a business model. Sullins needs a little more empathy and a little less rhetoric.

The Indonesian nickel accidents are horrific and the companies concerned need to have as much international pressure as possible to force them to change their practices. Spotlight should be commended for telling a story that needs telling and showing images that need showing.

The dodgy mining comparison

Sullins reckons we need 300 million tonnes of mined materials to decarbonise. Let’s accept this for now.

He then tried to minimise the size of this task by pointing to the 15 billion tonnes of fossil fuels extracted each and every year. Sullins put it this way:

“[The pollution and environmental costs of producing critical minerals] are virtually nothing compared … to the fossil fuel industry”

Really? I guess not many people think much about mining, but Sullins' error is pretty obvious when you do.

The following image is from a 2020 Global Tailings Review. The image shows how much stuff you have to dig up to get a paltry 20 million tonnes of copper annually; coincidentally it’s close to 15 billion tonnes!

If you go to the original report, you’ll find that the data behind that image is a little old, almost 20 years old. Since then copper ore grades have fallen; and are continuing to fall. In the decade from 2001 to 2012, they fell about 30%, meaning you need to dig up far more stuff to get your copper.

The Global Tailings Review estimated that coal generates just 8% of global tailings, compared to the 48% that copper generates.

Some people estimate we'll need to be producing over 50 million tonnes of copper annual by 2050 with increasing electrification. That will involved shifting about triple the current level of stuff extracted as fossil fuels annually.

So the mining required for our decarbonisation isn’t trivial; definitely not for copper, definitely not for nickel and not for many other things which Governments have decided are critical minerals. Sullins seems to think that if the nickel is being used for stainless steel, then the documentary has “fallen flat on it’s face”. Why? Stainless steel is a big part of the global decarbonisation effort and minimising its carbon footprint is absolutely essential.

Minimising harm to workers is always important.

Following the nickel

Sullins spends considerable amount of time trying to argue that very little Indonesian nickel is used in electric vehicle (EV) batteries. His backup argument is that the EV battery industry is moving away from battery chemistries containing nickel and in any event, most nickel goes into stainless steel.

In 2009, Indonesia banned exports of unprocessed nickel ore. It was a bold and risky move. In 2008, Indonesia produced just 10% of the world’s annual production of 1.2 million tonnes. But the Chinese saw an opportunity and invested in processing plants and by 2024, Indonesia produced 59% of the global annual nickel production of 3.7 million tonnes. But the Chinese didn’t just set up High Pressure Acid Leaching (HPAL) plants which traditionally processed laterite ores for the stainless steel business. It's laterite ores that are mined in Indonesia. The Chinese plants have changed and improved the HPAL process to produce battery grade materials. You will find a little of the detail here.

Here’s a flow chart of the refining process from the Nickel Institute, a global nickel trade organisation.

Can you see the line in this diagram from “Intermediates” to “Chemical use (battery)”? That represents this new flow. This is what Sullins missed.

The China/Indonesian partnership is also resulting not just in the production of battery grade material for Chinese battery factories, but the construction of EV battery plants in Indonesia itself. Indonesia wants to be a global player in the EV battery business. The European EV battery champion, Northvolt, failed spectacularly, and Indonesia’s plans could also fail; but I doubt they’ll fail for the same reason. I followed NorthVolt’s rise and they seemed very sincere about wanting to aggressively reduce the carbon footprint of batteries. I’m guessing that Indonesia just wants to sell them and get more of the value-added pipeline.

Indonesia recently moved to raise royalty payments on various minerals; including nickel, coal, copper and gold. The Financial Times, in the article just linked reckons the Indonesian budget is under strain from a $28b school lunch program. The Indonesian economy is a similar size to Australia’s, but servicing 10 times as many people. This makes any $28bn budget item highly significant. In 2023, Indonesia exported nickel with a value of $6.8b as part of its $51b mining export business. It’s hard to think of anything more valuable to Indonesia’s future than well nourished children, but there are limits to how much money you can raise from taxing resources. Big mining companies can mothball mines far quicker than they can open them.

Here’s a chart which Sullins uses and which he says demonstrates that no (or very little) Indonesian nickel ends up in EV batteries.

It’s from Wikipedia. He claims that the blank box for Indonesia in the “Nickel Production %” column means that Indonesia doesn’t supply nickel for EVs. Where is that table from? A company report or an academic study? Uncharacteristically for Wikipedia, it isn’t referenced. But if you add up the numbers in the “Nickel Production %” column they fall well short of 100%. So it seems like the blank entry for Indonesia is a “We don’t know” number or “We haven’t finished the chart yet” number.

But look a little further down the page and you see a second chart, which is referenced and complete. It comes from the IEA (a pretty reliable source) and makes it clear that Indonesia is a very large miner and processor of nickel for batteries. The green Indonesia bars are the biggest in both Mining and Material Processing.

How did Sullins see one chart and miss the other? Or perhaps he just picked the chart he wanted and interpreted the missing entry to meet his fictional story.

And what about Sullins' backup argument about the trends towards battery chemistries without nickel?

I put that question to DeepSeek, a Chinese AI chatbot. I figured it would have used more information from the Chinese companies at the heart of the industry. It put the proportion of batteries using one of the two main nickel chemistries (NMC and NCA) at between 40 and 55 percent. It reckoned LFP, the chemistry with neither nickel or cobalt, is being increasingly adopted, particularly for entry-level and mid-range EVs. For stationary storage, it estimated the percentage of NMC batteries at about 20-30%. For e-bikes, it put the percentage of NMC batteries at 40-50%. So I think Sullins has predicted the right trend, but the speed at which it plays out is anybody's guess. Nickel and cobalt make for batteries with a much higher energy density, so if you can supply them cheaply, its hard to see them vanishing soon.

The move away from cobalt started as a result of exposés of the child mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). I think the first of these was in 2016 from Amnesty International. Has cobalt vanished from the EV battery scene, no. There is a trend against it, but it will continue to find buyers if the price is right. The DRC may yet clean up its act and cobalt could quite reasonably return. As could nickel if the Indonesians clean up their act.

Had the likes of Sullins poured cold water on those cobalt exposés, as he is doing on the Indonesian Spotlight story, then maybe NMC would still be front and centre of the battery chemistries. Perhaps Sullins will also tackle the child mining problems of the DRC. He could call it “Insane lies about children dying in mines in the DRC”. He could lead with “I know children in mines is terrible but … children are exploited in many countries … blah blah blah”.

Deforestation …

Sullins seeks to downplay the deforestation by finding another deforestation story from Indonesia which is bigger than the Spotlight Story.

It’s always true that food choices dominate deforestation causes. In Australia, for example, we’ve cleared about 100 million hectares since white arrival. We use about 47 million for modified pastures (these are typically fertilised and sewn with introduced grasses) and another 35 million are cropped (with Australian livestock eating about 6 times more than Australian people). Mining and waste management is about 0.7 million hectares.

Spotlight showed a map of the expanding mining area on the island of Halmahera. It’s a couple of thousand hectares at most. But finding a bigger area of devastation is never a good way to argue in favour of a small area, particularly when it involves large, intransigent and complex toxic waste streams.

Conclusion

Accidents do indeed happen in any industry. The proper response is legal action to prosecute where there are suspicions of carelessness together with reform of procedures and processes.

Rio Tinto is one of world’s largest miners. They have over 60,000 employees working in 35 countries at some of the most potentially dangerous jobs on the planet. Consider its 2024 Annual Report. 2024 was a horror year for Rio Tinto, with the deaths of 5 people. In 2023, it was zero. Those 5 fatalities are front and centre on the RT website. RT all injury frequency rate (AIFR) is 0.37. This is defined differently either as accidents per 200,000 or per million hours worked. 0.37 would be 1.85 using the million-hours definition.

Is this good? A recent New South Wales Mine Safety report put the serious injury frequency rate (SIFR) for coal mines in that state at 1.2; metaliferous mines was a little higher at 1.5. SIFR is defined similarly to AIFR but ignoring minor injuries. And the NSW report uses the million-hours definition. You’d expect the serious injury rate to be lower than the all-injury rate. So yes, the Rio Tinto figure is extremely good. Large multi-nationals in the public eye take safety very seriously; regardless of where they are operating. It doesn’t really matter why they take it seriously; only that they do.

People like Sullins, who are dismissive of serious accidents as just the inevitable consequences of doing business, are probably much beloved by dodgy companies wanting to cut corners.