Just over a decade ago, Bahodopi, a remote district in eastern Indonesia, was a tangle of lush, tropical forest. There were no paved roads nor 24-hour electricity. When executives from nickel mining firms visited to survey the area’s then largely untapped reserves, they stayed at modest hotels lit by candles.
All of that began to change in 2014 when the Indonesian government took the drastic step of announcing a ban on all exports of raw nickel — the metal that is critical to the energy transition because of its use in batteries for electric vehicles.
The decision encouraged Chinese companies, led by steel giant Tsingshan Holding Group, to spend billions of dollars to set up processing plants in Bahodopi and across other parts of the south-east Asian country of 281mn people.