This island was once covered in forest. Now, it’s being transformed 
into a global hub for nickel, a metal crucial for making 
electric vehicle batteries. The Indonesian island of Sulawesi feeds 
the world’s largest battery makers, who power virtually every 
major seller of EVs. And that’s coming at a major cost. Dust, smoke, mud. There's no place to complain here. The community just has to bear it. Indonesia's nickel industry shows 
no signs of slowing down. It continues to attract tens of thousands of workers from across the country, even if the jobs could kill them. 13 people have died, and dozens more are injured after an explosion at a nickel plant in Indonesia. The Ministry of Manpower has sent a special team to investigate the cause of the explosion. People in Sulawesi say they are risking their lives and health to make a living. So what is the real cost of your electric vehicle? If you want to make electric cars that can 
go a long way on a single charge,

batteries with a high nickel content
are a very good way to do it. Adding nickel to battery cells 
increases their energy density. Indonesia has these 
enormous nickel reserves, that’s not new. What has changed in 
the last ten or so years is a number of advances in
the technology for processing nickel. And that created, really, a gold rush. Chinese companies saw 
an opportunity in Indonesia, which also has cheap labor and energy. So they started building 
nickel facilities across the country. The largest one is controlled by 
the top seller of nickel, Tsingshan. It’s called IMIP and sprawls 
across the seaside in Morowali. This is a place that occupies a land area that is about ten times larger than Central Park in New York. It looks like this incredibly 
large industrial facility was just dropped down the middle of what was really jungle and rice paddies even 15 or 20 years ago. As a result,

Morowali’s economy has been booming. It’s grown by nearly 600% between 2015 and 2022. It’s excellent because it provides 
job opportunities for unemployed youth. Now, there are big drawbacks. There is air pollution. Cheap power in Indonesia 
comes from coal. These are very dirty facilities. In the last five years, there has been an increase in patient visits 
with diseases caused by pollution. In our work area, apart from acute respiratory infections, we have found cases of 
tuberculosis among children, which we had never found before. The children's health is affected. 
They start coughing quickly.  When we wipe the windows, we notice thick layers of dust. We have to clean the dust off the desks 
every morning before class starts. When we are talking about a metal that is being used for electric vehicles, which are supposed to help us deal with climate change to 
make transportation greener, producing one of the key inputs

with coal is problematic. Around the island, trash is piling up, and signs of pollution are everywhere. On top of the environmental damage and concerns around health, there’s the issue over unsafe working conditions. On Christmas Eve of 2023, a fire broke out at a smelter for stainless steel located in IMIP. The blaze killed 21 men and injured many more. Workers we spoke to said injuries on the job are common because of the lack of safety gear. They asked for anonymity for fear of losing their jobs. The most common work accidents I have heard of are employees getting caught in heavy equipment, falling from heights, and some even getting severed hands. Many accidents happen almost every day. There have been similar incidents in other facilities. About a four hours’ drive up the coast from IMIP is a smelting facility called Gunbuster Nickel Industry. This plant, in North Morowali, was set up by Chinese metals company Jiangsu Delong.

In December 2022, two Gunbuster workers were trapped in the cab of a crane when coal dust caught fire beneath them. They burned to death. One of the workers was 20-year-old I Made Defri Hari Jonathan. Defri was my younger brother. We knew the risk of working in a mine is higher than working in the village here. Our family relatives said he was very lucky to get assigned to the hoist crane because the location was nice with air-conditioning and not in the furnace. The company covered the costs at the hospital, for autopsy, and for repatriating the body. The company also gave about 13 million rupiah ($824) including Defri's salary. [I’m] satisfied, because they were willing to take responsibility and did not wash their hands of the incident. The parents and sister actually told me they hadn't spent it because they felt, and this is what the father said,

and this really stuck with me, “The money is like Jonathan's body, 
how could I spend it?” When he decided to work there,  he hoped to be able to 
support our parents,  and the one thing that 
he kept saying was  that he wanted to build 
a house for our parents. That was all. After the accident that killed Jonathan, workers at Gunbuster staged protests. They turned violent, claiming two more lives. This is a video of a clash at Gunbuster taken by one of the workers. The unrest led Indonesia’s 
human rights regulator to launch an investigation. The report found “unsafe working conditions, lack of protection for 
workers’ health and welfare, and disregard for 
corporate responsibilities.” I am really worried 
about work accidents because I am afraid they 
could have a big impact on my family and myself if I become permanently disabled or die. A friend had an accident where his eye was hit by 
sparks from metal cuttings.

It caused him to be permanently disabled. I still work there, despite being disabled like this. It is difficult to find another job. Whether I like it or not, I must keep on working to provide for my family. People who live in the surrounding community don't feel they have any choice because there aren’t a lot of jobs in rural Sulawesi, so this is what you do. I am jobless because of the company. We had a meeting with the Chinese company, staged a demo, but there has been no response so far. Do you think the government cares about us? No government cares about us. They just make promises. False promises. Under Jokowi, the president who is leaving office this year, the government has been very enthusiastically in favor of what they call downstreaming, meaning bringing this processing onshore, forcing companies to do value-added activities in Indonesia. The government, while they've acknowledged

some of these criticisms have mostly stuck to the policy. And that includes the incoming President, Prabowo Subianto. I can say Indonesia’s nickel downstreaming program, we are, over and over, a success. That’s why the whole world says that Indonesia crashed the nickel market. We have seen this enormous expansion of the Indonesian nickel industry over the last five, ten years. There is now a huge amount of nickel in the world. As a result, prices have come down, and this has created a crisis, actually, in all of the nickel-producing countries that are not Indonesia. They say Indonesia, we make dirty mines. I'm asking, what is the definition of a dirty mine? Of a clean mine? Of premium nickel? This has been a big economic success story despite the environmental and human cost, and certainly, decision-makers in Jakarta don't intend to wind back their promotion of this industry any time soon.

Forecasts from BloombergNEF suggest that at the current 
rate things are going, Indonesia could account for  something like two-thirds 
of global nickel supply by the end of this decade. So it will be  the absolutely dominant producer. It's a really vivid example of how transactions that we think of as being fairly mundane, you know, buying a car or something thousands of people do 
around the world every day,  really do have effects on real people in real places, potentially very far away. Regarding electric cars, I have heard and read about them, but they're not here. I have never seen one. Regarding [nickel’s] 
purpose or function, I'm not entirely sure. What I do know is that since this is the only company here, many of us work here.

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