In mid-2020, an exasperated Elon Musk appealed for greater access to a commodity crucial to electric-vehicle battery production. “Any mining companies out there, please mine more nickel, okay?” he said on an earnings call. “Tesla will give you a giant contract for a long period of time if you mine nickel efficiently and in an environmentally sensitive way.”
The Tesla CEO soon found a supplier that could fulfill at least part of his request. In 2022, the EV maker struck a $5 billion deal to source nickel from Indonesia. The Muslim-majority archipelago of 280 million people has a landmass three times the size of Texas, scattered across an island chain spanning a distance comparable to that between San Francisco and Bermuda in the mid-Atlantic. Buried beneath its mangroves, ancient rainforests, and active volcanoes is the world’s largest reserve of nickel: 42% of the global supply. The metallic element is a component crucial to rechargeable batteries—including those in EVs—and to the world’s overall green transition.
