In 2015, only seven years after it broke ground on Obi, Harita announced that it was expanding its operations there, this time teaming up with subsidiaries of Xinxing Ductile Iron Pipes Co., a Chinese state-owned enterprise based in Hebei Province, to build a $320 million smelter to refine nickel ore. But this was peanuts compared with the new $1.05 billion smelter, fired by a huge coal power plant, that would come on line in 2021, this time financed by Harita and another Chinese company, Lygend Resources. Two Chinese electric vehicle battery manufacturers, GEM and Easpring, agreed to buy nickel and cobalt by-products from the new venture for eight years.

But there was a darker side to what was happening on Obi. One of the problems was where to put the waste, or tailings, that resulted from the production of nickel. Two years before, according to the environmental reporting website Mongabay, Harita backed down from a plan to pump 6 million tons of waste into the deep sea in the face of protests. But damage was already being done.