Pirate's Cove

Right above the headline at the article you’ll notice it says “clean cars, hidden toll”

To meet EV demand, industry turns to technology long deemed hazardous

On a remote island close to where the Pacific meets the Indian Ocean sits one of the first refineries built specifically to support the world’s transition away from fossil fuels.

Rocks unearthed here contain traces of nickel, a key ingredient in electric vehicle batteries. Extracting it, refining it and readying it for export is a gargantuan task.

More than $1 billion has been sunk into the processing facility, the first in Indonesia to use an acid-leaching technology to convert low-grade laterite nickel ore — which the country has in abundance — into a higher-grade material suitable for batteries. Foreign investors and lenders cite the project as evidence of their commitment to fighting climate change.

But the sprawling facility, bordered on one side by forest and on the other by blue seas, faces a major challenge: what to do with the roughly 4 million metric tons of toxic waste produced every year — enough, approximately, to fill 1,667 Olympic-size swimming pools.

Yeah, we noticed this issue years ago

In 2020, the companies behind the project told the government they had a solution: They would pump the waste into the ocean. They ultimately backtracked in the face of public pressure. But it’s not clear that the on-land storage alternative they’ve offered instead is significantly safer.

So, wait, this was a Known Issue years ago, and the WP is just now telling their inside the beltway consumers about it, after pimping the forced electric vehicle push?

And as 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.

This technology, using acid under conditions of intense heat and pressure to remove nickel from raw ore, has never been tested before in Indonesia, where the frequency of earthquakes, heavy rainfall and landslides can make it especially treacherous to transport and store hazardous waste. 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.

So, screwing these villagers in a 3rd world (2nd world?) nation to take care of the Elites in the 1st world.

The surging interest in nickel is part of the global boom in demand for a range of metals used in making EVs, which typically require six times the mineral inputs of their fossil-fuel burning counterparts to make them run. But while the transition to EVs is widely considered essential in addressing climate change, there has often been little recognition of the toll that extraction and processing of these raw materials — including technologies now urgently needed to produce the quantity and quality of minerals required — will take on the lives and livelihoods of local communities and the surrounding environment.

Little recognition? Those who are against the forced EV push have been noting it for years. Even if we support EVs (which I do), we just do not like mandates, we note it. They may be much better for air quality and not having gas and oil on the ground and in the waters, EVs create their own environmental damage, and this rush to force them on citizens hasn’t factored in the overall damage.