Large amounts of nickel are needed for electric car batteries, but getting it out of the ground and refining it often requires clearing rainforests and generating large amounts of carbon

See EV Makers Confront the ‘Nickel Pickle’ by Jon Emont of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"In the electric-vehicle business, the quandary is known as the nickel pickle.

To make batteries for EVs, companies need to mine and refine large amounts of nickel. The process of getting the mineral out of the ground and turning it into battery-ready substances, though, is particularly environmentally unfriendly. Reaching the nickel means cutting down swaths of rainforest. Refining it is a carbon-intensive process that involves extreme heat and high pressure, producing waste slurry that’s hard to dispose of.

The nickel issue reflects a larger contradiction within the EV industry: Though electric vehicles are designed to be less damaging to the environment in the long term than conventional cars, the process of building them carries substantial environmental harm."

"One Indonesian mine, known as Hengjaya, obtained permits five years ago to expand its operations into a forested area nearly three times the size of New York City’s Central Park. The mine’s Australian owner, Nickel Industries, said that rainforest clearing in 2021 caused greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 56,000 tons of carbon-dioxide. That’s roughly equal to driving 12,000 conventional cars for a year"

"land clearing is required for all open-cast mining processes, including our operations"

"Nickel is responsible for more than a third of the carbon emissions generated from making a common type of battery cell"

"Auto executives worried about having enough nickel to meet rapidly growing demand for EVs. They had moved away from cobalt, another battery component, after human-rights groups and journalists reported on widespread child labor in cobalt operations and dangerous conditions faced by miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo"

"Millions of years ago, tectonic plates converged in what is now eastern Indonesia, lifting the ocean’s mineral-rich seafloor to the surface and creating today’s nickel bounty. The region is covered in rainforest, filled with flora especially adapted to the nickel-rich soil. Many of the creatures here don’t live anywhere else, like the maleo, a pink-breasted bird that buries its eggs underground, where they are heated by geothermal energy, and the anoa, the world’s smallest wild cattle species."

"The nickel rush has created pressing new environmental concerns. The HPAL process involves dousing nickel ore in sulfuric acid and heating it to more than 400 degrees Fahrenheit at enormous pressures. Producing nickel this way is nearly twice as carbon-intensive as mining and processing sulfide nickel found in Canada and Russia. Another way of processing laterite ore that often uses coal-powered furnaces is six times as carbon-intensive"

"how to get rid of the processing waste. It is difficult to safely sequester in tropical countries because frequent earthquakes and heavy rains destabilize soil, which can cause waste dams to collapse. A 2018 Indonesian law allowed companies to obtain permits to discard mineral processing waste into the ocean."