CLEAN CARS, HIDDEN TOLL: To meet EV demand, industry turns to technology long deemed hazardous, 10 May 2023

[A]s global demand for nickel surges, company executives and Indonesian government leaders are turning to a refining technology long considered too risky to embrace, too perilous for the environment and for local communities.

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[High-Pressure Acid Leaching (HPAL)], using acid under conditions of intense heat and pressure to remove nickel from raw ore, has never been tested before in Indonesia,[...]. The process poses steep environmental costs that have yet to be reckoned with, according to interviews with more than 40 people familiar with the country’s nickel industry, visits to six largely isolated mining villages in eastern Indonesia and visual analyses by mining experts. [...]At least 10 other projects using this same technology are already under development [...]

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[...R]epresentatives from the two companies that jointly own the processing plant on Obira island — an Indonesian firm, Harita Group, and a Chinese firm, Lygend Resources — said that the operation has not had a negative impact on the environment and that the pollution along the coast was not related to waste produced by their plant. All of their operations, they emphasized, are in “full compliance” with government requirements.

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Villagers and environmental activists say they remain concerned that Harita and Lygend, which operate jointly in Indonesia under the name PT HPAL, are failing to honor their promise to keep the waste on Obira out of the ocean and have not adequately addressed the risks posed by storing the waste on land.

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Since the Harita Group ventured into mining in the early 2000s, it has clashed with local communities several times, including on Obira, where journalists who tried to report on the effects of the mine have been detained and intimidated by security personnel employed by Harita [...]

Sian Choo Lim, head of sustainability at Harita, said that there may be an “image” that the company has not done enough to protect the environment, but that it’s unfounded. [...]

Lygend and its subsidiaries have been cited in China for violating environmental regulations at least four times in as many years, [...]Zhang Baodong, a Lygend representative, declined to address these violations. “What we’ve done [at Obira] is already very up to mark,” he said. “I have nothing more to add.”

Environmental regulations in Indonesia have long been difficult to enforce because they’re often delegated to faraway provincial governments, which are not only strapped for funds but prone to corruption, activists say. Now, they say, even those regulations are being rolled back in some cases to attract foreign investment. [...]