Indonesia’s bid for EV nickel supremacy is doomed to failure

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“I can walk into a showroom in Shanghai today and for roughly $US50,000 [$75,750] I can buy a ZEEKR 001 that gets me 1000 kilometres range and can be recharged in eight minutes,” said Ken Hoffman, head of battery materials at McKinsey. None of this was on the radar screen when Tesla’s Elon Musk issued his plea for “more nickel” in July 2020, offering giant long-term contracts to any mining company that could meet the parabolic rise in demand expected by the late 2020s. Indonesian President Joko Widodo was already a step ahead, but with an entirely different idea in...