"Dirty Nickel, Clean Power: Making the Ocean Bleed Red" 21 February 2023

Last August, the Indonesian government announced that it had signed a $5 billion contract to sell nickel to Tesla. Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a specialist information provider for the lithium-ion battery supply chain, projects that Indonesia could become the world’s second-largest producer of cobalt by 2030, after the Democratic Republic of the Congo. [...]

In the Malukus and in Sulawesi, most of the largest mines are majority-owned by Chinese groups, and the people I spoke with complained about the employment of Chinese nationals over Indonesians. Almost without exception, my interviewees told me that the mining operations had turned the sea kemerahan (“reddish”) and that it had become nearly impossible to fish in the vicinity. [...]

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. The Indonesian magazine Tempo reported in early 2022 that waste was being pumped out of a black pipe and that mountains of polluted soil were being washed into the sea. When I was there, the waste pipe had apparently been moved, but the sea around the mine site was still “reddish” with dirt, and fishermen complained that it was almost impossible to fish. [...]

It is perhaps hard to believe that such a remote and ostensibly wild a place as Obi belongs to anyone, but Harita and Lygend were not operating in a vacuum. Much of the land they were developing had been farmed by local people who came to the island long before the companies arrived there. When Harita’s subsidiaries retroactively tried to compensate the former owners, they offered them a pittance.

[...]And it is not just Aris [a Professor] who has said that the water is polluted: A separate water sample commissioned by The Guardian last year revealed that the cancer-causing chemical hexavalent chromium—of Erin Brockovich fame—was present in alarmingly high levels in water near the mine site.

[S]ecurity forces were in league with the mining company. Kahfi, the Laiwui chief, [...]was arrested and jailed for two months for protesting at the mine. Local journalists [...] had also been detained after they approached the mine.