Indonesian Nickel Overview: Potential, Development and Future Prospects

In the last two decades, nickel has become an important issue due to escalating demand from various industries such as stainless steel, non-ferrous alloys, plating, casting and especially batteries with compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 8% from 2015 to 2040. Nickel is the fifth most abundant element in the world, which is originated from magmatic-sulphide and laterites. About 40% of world nickel production is resulted from laterite ore in which Indonesia is listed as one of the largest nickel laterite resource countries in the world. Currently, the Indonesian nickel laterite ore has been processed with both pyrometallurgy and hydrometallurgy approaches industrially with the development target of 2.9 million tons yearly production by 2030. On the other hand, the awareness to implement net zero emission (NZE) has been highly considered, therefore, hydrometallurgy development becomes the most prominent alternative technology to process the low-grade nickel laterite ore. Furthermore, this review aims to provide the Indonesian nickel information comprehensively from resource, reserve, nickel ore distribution, classification, industrial development, supply chain, sustainability regarding the NZE and nickel prospects in the future. Moreover, depiction on the correlation of laterite nickel ore characteristic on its optimum processing technology will also be briefly presented in this review article, in order to assess the effectivity of technology implementation to process different types of nickel lateritic ores.