# Indonesian Nickel Boom The most successful resource-nationalist industrial policy of the century, and the case that shows conflict-mineral harm does not require a conflict. Indonesia banned nickel ore exports on **1 January 2020** to force processing onshore — *hilirisasi*, downstreaming. It worked, spectacularly. Indonesia's share of world nickel mine production went from **31.5% in 2020 to roughly 67% in 2025** (2.60 Mt of 3.90 Mt). The EU won a WTO case against the ban in November 2022; Indonesia appealed into the defunct Appellate Body, so the ruling is unenforceable and the ban stands. The consequence for everyone else was a price collapse. Indonesian supply crushed the nickel market and shut producers in New Caledonia and Australia — a single state's industrial policy restructuring a global commodity. ## Who actually owns it This is the part that complicates the "Indonesian" framing. **More than 75% of Indonesia's nickel refining capacity is Chinese-controlled on a beneficial-ownership basis.** Tsingshan and Jiangsu Delong alone hold stakes in refineries totalling over 70% of capacity, financed substantially by China Development Bank and Bank of China. The two anchor complexes: **IMIP** at Morowali on Sulawesi — 54-plus companies, over 80,000 workers, majority Tsingshan — and **IWIP** on Halmahera, containing **Weda Bay Nickel** (Tsingshan 51.3% / Eramet 37.8% / Antam 10%), now the largest nickel mine in the world. That ownership split is precisely why a mine usually described as French fails the US foreign-entity test. ## The cost **Workers.** The **24 December 2023** furnace explosion at PT Indonesia Tsingshan Stainless Steel at IMIP killed **21 people** — 13 Indonesian, 8 Chinese — and injured over 40. A compilation of media-reported incidents counts **101 deaths across Indonesian nickel facilities between 2015 and mid-2024**, nearly half of them at IMIP. Documented labour findings include a "production first, safety later" culture, retaliation against workers who report accidents, and passport confiscation for Chinese migrant workers. **Health and environment**, from Climate Rights International's June 2025 report on the IWIP area: - Acute respiratory infections at one clinic rose from **434 patients in 2020 to 10,579 in 2023** — roughly a 24-fold increase. - **47% of residents** near IWIP had blood mercury above safe limits; 32% above for arsenic — higher than industrial workers. - Eleven captive coal plants operating with three more under construction; about 28.6 Mt CO₂ a year at full build. - River nickel at 4.37–4.84 mg/l against a 0.5 mg/l standard; fish arsenic at twenty times the 2007 baseline. - Over 5,000 hectares of primary rainforest cleared; thirteen major floods since operations began. Nickel mining accounts for about 56,000 hectares of Indonesia's mining deforestation footprint, and mining-driven forest loss accelerated to roughly 10,000 hectares a year by 2023. Indonesian deforestation overall surged 66% in 2025. **Tailings.** The battery-grade HPAL route produces **150–200 tonnes of tailings per tonne of nickel**, and IMIP sits on an active fault in a high-rainfall zone. March 2025 brought three failures in eleven days, one killing three workers. Authorities have been considering fresh requests for deep-sea tailings disposal. **The Hongana Manyawa.** Around 3,500 people, of whom roughly 500 live in voluntary isolation on Halmahera. Weda Bay's concession reportedly overlaps their territory across most of its area. In **September 2025 Norway's $1.6 trillion sovereign wealth fund divested its Eramet stake** on findings of "unacceptable risk" of severe environmental and human-rights harm — the single most citable institutional judgment on the case. BASF had already withdrawn from a $2.6 billion HPAL partnership with Eramet after campaign pressure. ## Why it belongs in this cluster Indonesia has no armed group, no rebel taxation, no smuggling route. It has **licensed industrial operators with permits from a functioning state** — and it produces deaths, deforestation, contamination and displacement of an uncontacted people at scale. That is the limit case for the whole conflict-minerals frame. The frame asks *who controls the mine* and assumes the answer distinguishes legitimate from illegitimate supply. Indonesia's answer is "a company with a licence," and the harm is documented anyway. The policy response, meanwhile, is not regulation but **exclusion**. US clean-energy tax rules disqualify supply with more than 25% ownership by a Chinese-linked entity, which is most of Indonesian capacity; the March 2026 US-Indonesia trade deal secures access without touching that ownership constraint or any of the harms above. Indonesian and international civil-society groups have called it "extractive colonialism." Separately, Jakarta has begun using production quotas as a price lever — cutting 2026 ore quotas by roughly a third — which is the same instrument [[Democratic Republic of the Congo]] discovered with cobalt. ## See also [[Conflict Resources Atlas]] · [[Critical Minerals]] · [[Lithium Triangle]] · [[Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining]] · [[Conflict Minerals Hub]]