The elements of power, p.34
The Elements of Power, page 34
By 2022, Pertamina was trying to turn a corner. The firm was focusing on growth through nickel-based battery chemistries. “We want to use the nickel resources in Indonesia as much as possible, and as soon as possible, we want to push NMC,” said Adriel Simorangkir, who at the time worked as a corporate strategist at Pertamina’s arm for new and renewable energy. It would play into two of Indonesia’s strong suits—nickel was the country’s cash cow, but Indonesia was also boosting its production of cobalt. In 2023, according to the Cobalt Institute, Indonesia was the second-largest producer of cobalt in the world: That year, the country’s output of the metal rose 86 percent and contributed to a quarter of the global supply growth. By 2030, the institute estimated, Indonesia would produce 16 percent of the world’s cobalt supply (a distant second to Congo, predicted to produce 67 percent of the world’s supply by 2030).
Indonesia’s GDP was benefiting from its nickel. So was Xiang Guangda, the nickel magnate, who had become a billionaire many times over. His firm, Tsingshan, had started looking at other new-energy metals in other places, like lithium in Chile. In late 2023, the Chilean government announced that a Tsingshan subsidiary would join BYD in investing in the country’s lithium production and refining infrastructure. Chile’s president, Gabriel Boric, said that, together, the two firms would be investing more than half a billion dollars in his homeland.
Indonesia’s investment in nickel paid off. When I visited in November 2022, Indonesia was aboil with the news that Elon Musk had worn a Batik Bomba shirt from a Central Sulawesi village, which environmental activists took as a bad omen for that island’s forests. In August that year, Tesla had signed a $5 billion contract for Indonesian nickel. BYD would follow suit in early 2025, when it announced that it would be building an electric vehicle plant in West Java.
* * *
In Jakarta, many people were optimistic about the development prospects that nickel had ushered in. Simorangkir, the Pertamina strategist, was a recent graduate of Imperial College London. In his twenties, he wore round spectacles and sported shorn hair. When he was not working on energy, he helped out as “chief munchies officer” at a trendy bar in South Central Jakarta. Simorangkir told me that he had decided to come back to Indonesia rather than stay in Europe because he was particularly excited about the creation of Indonesian electric vehicles. His focus was not on electric cars but on scooters, which are abundant in Indonesia. “We’re trying to introduce nickel-based batteries into the two-wheeler market,” Simorangkir said. China, with its enormous economies of scale, was an all-powerful competitor. “We’re directly competing with Chinese batteries, which are much more affordable.”
In Jakarta and on the island of Bali, Pertamina had already teamed up with Gojek and Grab, two of Indonesia’s “super-apps”—through which one can buy groceries, hail taxis, make deliveries, and even pay shops—to provide battery-swapping stations, or “swap shops.” At these depots, appended to already-existing Pertamina gas stations, depleted lithium-ion batteries could be swapped out for fully charged ones, making the prospect of driving an electric delivery bike seamless and cutting out long charging times. (The concept had already caught on in China, and when I spoke with Akira Yoshino, he predicted it would soon be a global trend.) “We have ten locations in Jakarta, fourteen battery-swapping stations in total,” he said. “And we just built another six in Bali.”
Pertamina had seen rapid growth in demand for the battery-swapping service since it was launched earlier that year. Competition between the apps was fierce, Simorangkir said. “Indonesia has the potential to become the leader in electrification,” he insisted, but he acknowledged just how difficult the transition to a battery-focused economy would be. “Most of our battery cell production now is just very dirty.”
The Harita Group’s site on Obi Island. Nickel and cobalt are being loaded onto ore carriers. In the 2020s, Harita mostly shipped its products from Obi to China.
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According to activists in Jakarta, Sulawesi was, in fact, an example of “best practices” in the Indonesian mining industry. Obi—the largest of the Obi Islands in the province of North Maluku, part of the vast Maluku archipelago—was an example of real degradation, they told me. In 2021, the isle had received a huge investment from Chinese firms to create a nickel- and cobalt-processing plant. But it had also been criticized for destroying a remote part of Indonesia where there had been little development for hundreds of years.
In December 2023, a few days after meeting Simorangkir, I boarded a rusted ferry called the Queen Mary to make the nineteen-hour journey to Obi from the island of Ternate, which I had reached on a series of meandering flights. I woke the next morning to the sound of vendors hawking nasi kuning—warm turmeric rice rolled into cone-shaped plastic bags—and jungly hills rose from bright-blue water. We rounded a headland and Obi came into view, its hills higher than I imagined, swathed in fog and thundering cloud.
Upi, a local environmental activist, told me that as legend has it, they are home to ghosts who watch over town from the woods. Endemic species of butterfly, flying foxes, and paradise-crows all live among the trees, despite the encroachment of loggers in recent years. Under the sea, in areas away from the mine, shallow coral reefs alive with clownfish and Moorish idols stretch for miles.
The trees had once made the islands—or at least those who controlled them—fabulously wealthy. For hundreds of years, Ternate and the Maluku archipelago, known by Europeans as the Spice Islands, were the only places on earth where the small aromatic clove flower grew. In the fifteenth century, whoever controlled the Spice Islands was bound to make a fortune selling spices like cloves and nutmeg at highly inflated prices in Europe. When Columbus set out on his journey west from Spain, he was searching for a quicker way to get to the Malukus. When the Dutch colonized the islands, they exchanged the tiny islet of Run with the British for another one of their overseas properties: Manhattan.
But the forests and the seas were now being ignored and destroyed in favor of a far greater stock of wealth in a world obsessed with energy. And that stock of wealth lay beneath the soil.
On Ternate, I had met a burly man in a blue polo with Save the Coral emblazoned across the back. Muhammad Aris was in his forties and had a penchant for slim cigarettes, which he smoked constantly. Aris had studied fish all his life. For twenty years, he had been teaching aquaculture at Ternate’s Khairun University. “I want to make sure that the ocean is clean for the long-term life of the marine ecosystem,” he explained. There, Aris ran a project to plant seaweed near the village of Jailolo. “It’s a technology transfer to the locals so they can have new ways of making a livelihood,” he told me.
Through his obsession with fish and aquatic life, Aris had been inadvertently propelled onto the front lines of the resource rush for battery metals. His wife was from Obi, and by the late 2010s, he had started to hear reports that on the island’s southeast coast—and on Malamala, one of the islets adjacent to Obi—a huge nickel mining operation was stripping the hills of lush tropical forest and had gouged deep scars into the ocher earth. The sea, elsewhere in the islands a shimmering palette of turquoise, teal, and aquamarine, had turned a dull brown color that the locals call kemerahan, or reddish. At least eleven different species of fish there had been poisoned by heavy metals, which had destroyed their organs and ovaries and could potentially cause health problems for humans who ate them.
The main town on Obi, Laiwui, which is perhaps a three-hour ride from the mine site by way of motorized canoe, was a laid-back place of cinder-block bungalows that occasionally reverberated with bassy music coming from passing vehicles. “Obi is a unique place,” Abdul Kahfi, the thirty-eight-year-old chief of Laiwui, told me. “There are no Indigenous people here, so many people have come over the years from all over Indonesia—from Java, from Sulawesi. It looks like a miniature Indonesia.”
But on Obi, Kahfi told me, many people complained—as they did in Bahodopi, in mineral-rich parts of Congo, in the phosphate-rich Western Sahara, and indeed in many, if not most, places where new critical minerals were being dug up—about serious changes to their world. They complained about forced displacement, low reimbursement for land that had been grabbed by mining companies, pollution of their farmlands. And like in Congo and in the Western Sahara, the concerns had coalesced into a separatist movement of sorts, or at least one that sought a federal status for Obi and the surrounding area that gave those who lived there more control over their own destinies. Their concerns echoed those expressed almost a decade before in a report by the Australian Non-Judicial Human Rights Redress Mechanisms Project at PT Weda Bay Nickel, a mine site on the nearby island of Halmahera. The report found that a “paramilitary arm” of the Indonesian police had pressured residents to sell their land to the mining company for obscenely low compensation. On Obi, the people I spoke to insisted that such practices were alive and well.
Chinese companies like Huayou were forging ahead with development. In 2024, Huayou would boast that its plant at Weda Bay, the world’s largest HPAL project, would have an “epoch-making impact” on the global nickel market.
* * *
The major mining companies on Obi and on Sulawesi are either majority-owned or significantly invested in by Chinese groups, and local islanders to whom I spoke complained about the employment of Chinese workers over Indonesians. A worker for the Harita Group, the conglomerate that operates the mine on Obi, told me that there were over a thousand Chinese workers at the facility. Almost without exception, people mentioned that the mining operations had turned the sea “reddish” and that it had become almost impossible to fish in the vicinity. “The fish don’t come near here anymore,” said Lisman Musahati, a twenty-seven-year-old fisherman in the village of Soligi, which is around four miles from the main mine site on Obi. His grievances echoed what I had heard in Sulawesi. “The waste from the mines is destroying the coral reefs, and we can’t fish in this area anymore. We have to go farther out to catch anything—twenty miles out and further in small boats.”
Shortly after the rapprochement between China and Indonesia in 2005, the Harita Group applied for a permit to begin mining there. Harita started out in 1915 as a grocery store founded by a Chinese immigrant to Indonesia. By the first decade of this century, it had expanded into timber, palm oil, and gold and nickel mining, making its owner a billionaire.
By 2008, on Obi, the beginnings of a mine site that would come to look like a miniature city had been erected, and operations had begun. Four years later, Harita planned an initial public offering of its nickel division in Singapore to raise $250 million. It advertised in the city’s Central Business District with the slogan “Mum was wrong. Slow and steady doesn’t win the race.”
Perhaps the only entity on the island who seemed to be in any kind of rush was Harita, true to its advertising. In 2015, only seven years after it had first broken ground, Harita announced that it was once again expanding on Obi, this time teaming up with subsidiaries of Xinxing Ductile Iron Pipes Co., a company based in China’s Hebei Province, to build a $320 million smelter for the refinement of nickel ore. But this was nothing when compared with the $1.05 billion investment in 2019. Financed by Harita and Lygend, another Chinese company, and fired by a huge coal power plant, this new project, a nickel-and-cobalt smelter, opened in 2021. Two Chinese EV battery firms, GEM and Easpring, agreed to buy nickel and cobalt byproducts from the new venture for eight years.
On a sunny day in May 2021, Jiang Xinfang, the president of Lygend Resources, gave a rousing speech at a ceremony celebrating the first batch of products from the new smelter. For the occasion, he was dressed in turquoise factory workwear and a red hard hat. “We have every reason to believe,” he said, “that this project will achieve the record of the fastest production reaching the standard in the industry and create more miracles!” He went on to laud the “professional planning scheme” he envisioned for Obi, an island that, outside the mine site, is still remote, even by Indonesian standards. He imagined an airport, supermarkets, and shopping malls, as well as a “new town with complete supporting facilities, livable environment, and humanistic characteristics.”
One of the problems that Harita encountered, however, was where to put the waste, or tailings, that resulted from the production of nickel. Two years before, according to the conservation news site Mongabay, Harita had backed down, in the face of protests, from a plan to pump six million tons of waste into the deep sea, but the damage had already been done. In early 2022, the Indonesian magazine Tempo reported that waste was being pumped out of a black pipe and that mountains of waste 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,” and fishermen complained that it was almost impossible to fish. “The thing I love most about Obi is the fish, but now after the mining, the fishermen can’t catch fish,” Kahfi, the chief, told me. (In response to such charges, Anie Rahmi, Harita’s corporate communications manager, wrote to me to stress that “Harita Nickel is fully committed to meeting both Indonesian and global ESG standards.”)
Aris, the professor whom I met in Ternate, said that he had approached Harita in 2010 about doing an environmental study near the Obi mine site. After nine years, Harita finally allowed him to start taking water samples from the area, although his access to many sites, including the main mine, was severely limited and, in some cases, prohibited.
Nevertheless, Aris was able to examine water, fish, and fluted giant clams, and he prepared three academic studies to present his findings. In one paper, he wrote that his research had found “degeneration and cell necrosis” in the fluted giant clams, which are listed as a “conservation-dependent” species because their natural habitat has been impacted by humans. “This change is thought to be influenced by heavy metals,” he continued. “Heavy metal content in liquids exceeds the quality standard threshold.” In another paper, he noted the degradation of fish tissues. His sampling detected levels of ammonia, nitrate, dissolved oxygen, nickel, and iron that exceeded water-quality standards set by the government. In the conclusion to his paper on fish, he described it as “a reference for warning of heavy metal pollution in Obi Island waters.”
When it came time for Aris to publish his results, Harita contacted him. “They asked me to change the data,” he told me. When he refused, the company tried to prevent the study from appearing. “They sent a letter to the university,” he said, “and the rector spoke to me directly and told me not to publish that the water pollution level was over the limit.” (Khairun University did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment.) Aris decided to publish his work despite the pressure, and he has not received funding to conduct another study in the Obi area since. A separate water sample tested in 2022 by The Guardian, the British newspaper, revealed that the cancer-causing chemical hexavalent chromium, of Erin Brockovich fame, was present in worryingly high levels in water near the mine site.
At Kawasi, the village nearest to the Harita mine, I saw just how the landscape had been wrenched from wilderness to dystopia by Harita’s nickel operations. Tall smokestacks belched a reddish-gray fug, and a river gushed reddish-gray water into the blue sea. Kahfi would later tell me that he was arrested and jailed for two months after protesting at the mine. Local journalists, he said, had also been detained after they approached the mine. A pair of Indonesian warships loomed menacingly on the horizon.
Our boat landed on a drab beach pocked with litter. Chickens pecked at plastic bottles and packaging. Despite the state-of-the-art nickel refinery yards behind the town, there were neither drains nor trash collection services, so the sea was used as a dump by the local population. Through the sheet of rain, we saw the glow of a fisherman’s clove cigarette. He beckoned us onto the porch of his home. We watched the rain for hours and talked about how the company had plans to displace the people of Kawasi. The minerals their land held were so powerful that no one could live there.
Chapter 47
Buried Underground
On the morning of March 28, 2019, Nitunga Ilunga woke early at his home in the Kanina neighborhood of Kolwezi. The area was pocked with deep holes in the ground where people had dug pits to look for cobalt and copper veins. The government was conducting a “sensibilization” campaign, and now people in the neighborhood did not go down into the holes, or at least they said they didn’t—many were still gaping open. Sometimes, at night, small children would tumble into them, falling to their deaths in the darkness below.
Ilunga, who worked as an artisanal miner, told his wife, Françoise, that he was heading out. They spent a few minutes calmly chatting about the education of their seven children and how things were going at school for each of them. Then, another familiar topic came up: the piece of property they hoped to buy using the money that Ilunga earned as a miner. “We discussed buying a small plot of land to build a home,” Françoise said. “But since we didn’t have enough money yet, we were renters.”
Artisanal mining was a profession that Ilunga had chosen out of necessity, not out of any particular passion for clambering into the earth and digging up minerals. “He liked this work only because there was no other work for him,” Françoise said. “He had hope for his children. He worked for his children. Through the work, we thought that our children were growing up well, that they were able to go to school, that they ate well, and we were excited to buy a parcel of land.”
Ilunga worked on a team that illegally entered industrial mine sites and dug up ore to feed the insatiable global appetite for cobalt. “He would go depending on the opportunities: If there was a chance to go in during the day, he would enter; if he had the chance to go in at night, he would go in then,” Françoise said. His team would get into the mines by “fraud,” she noted, by paying off the guards.
