Perrine Fournier is a trade and forests campaigner at the forests and rights NGO Fern
The view from the highest vantage point in Kabaena island is awe-inspiring. Mountain peaks coated with thin clouds rise over a thick blanket of vegetation.
But the natural beauty of this tropical island in Indonesia’s Southeast Sulawesi province, belies the human and environmental damage that’s unfolding below – and which is set to intensify.
This harm is driven by mining for the vast reserves of nickel which lie beneath the island’s surface. Nickel is defined as a ‘critical mineral’, as it’s an essential component of electric vehicle (EV) batteries. As countries shift away from fossil fuels, global demand for nickel has surged.
Mining companies have been granted access to vast swathes of Kabaena, with licenses awarded to mine around three-quarters of the island’s territory. Only a few mining concessions are currently operating – but their impact is already being felt deeply.
“Because of the mining, all we see is mud. Flooding,” says Sahrul, a local resident. Sahrul is the founder of Sagori, a group resisting mining on the island, and he says that mining has created social conflicts between its supporters and opponents: “Relationships within families are breaking because of the mining.”
Sahrul is the founder of Sagori, a group resisting mining on Kabaena
Amal, a 25-year-old tourism student, echoes these complaints. He says that while mining has brought economic benefits, it’s also brought environmental ruin. “The mining company broke our forests. They made us lose our river. Water is the main point of life, we get it from nature. But we’re losing it.”
Threatening the Sea Nomads
Reports corroborate these claims.
Indonesia is the world’s biggest nickel producer, and has the largest reserves on earth, most of which are in Sulawesi and Halmahera islands. In the so-called ‘nickel provinces’ of these islands, including Kabaena in Southeast Sulawesi, mining’s damage has manifested itself in different forms.
Last month, Satya Bumi, a local NGO working to protect Indonesia’s forests and ecosystems, published a report comprehensively documenting it.
They detailed the sea and river pollution contaminating once pristine waters, reducing fish stocks, causing children skin infections, and threatening the livelihoods of local people, particularly the Indigenous Bajau community – known as Sea Nomads for their exceptional diving ability.
Indonesia turns traditional Indigenous land into nickel industrial zone
Then there’s deforestation: mining for nickel is now the biggest cause of deforestation in the nickel mining provinces. Out of the 920,000 hectares (ha) of nickel mining concessions in Indonesia, about two-thirds are under forest cover.
So who’s driving this demand and what should be done to mitigate the damage it’s causing?
Energy transition
China, the world leader in producing and exporting EV batteries, has poured investments into Indonesia’s nickel industry since the latter banned raw nickel-ore exports in 2020, to try to boost investments in ‘downstream processing’ (such as refining and battery manufacturing).
In the three years to 2023, Indonesia signed deals worth more than US$15 billion for battery materials with major corporations including Hyundai, LG and Foxconn, Reuters reported last year. So far, however, European investment in Indonesia’s nickel industry has not materialised.
In July, the German chemical manufacturer BASF and the French mining multinational Eramet, pulled out of a huge nickel and cobalt refinery in Indonesia because of its impact on one of the last Indigenous tribes still living in voluntary isolation.
But Satya Bumi’s supply chain mapping of Kabaena’s nickel, provides evidence that it’s entering global supply chains, including to the EU.
What’s more, the EU is currently negotiating a major free trade agreement with Indonesia, and focusing much attention on securing the critical raw materials Europe needs for the green energy and digital transitions – for instance through its Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA), which entered into force earlier this year.
The EU is therefore keen to strike a deal with Indonesia, believing it will support European investors to secure access to the raw materials that underpin its green investment strategies.
Children’s future
When this happens, EU investment must be built on a partnership with Indonesia which incentivises Indonesia to eliminate the environmental and social damage the industry is wreaking in Kabaena and elsewhere.
Indonesian civil society groups are already working to end this destruction, including by calling for nickel mining No Go Zones to limit forest and biodiversity loss. The Indonesian NGO Auriga Nusantara has reported that forests are disappearing twice as fast in areas surrounding nickel-processing plants than elsewhere.
It’s also essential that Indigenous Peoples and local communities who live in areas coveted by mining companies have their fundamental human right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) respected.
Tamrin, a 34-year-old coffee shop owner and father of five in Kabaena, has an unequivocal message for those oblivious to the human and environmental cost of their EV batteries: “If you want to buy an electric car, sure. It may be comfortable for you. But consider the places that are impacted by the mineral extraction… I hope to God my children have a future on this Island.”
The post Nickel mining for electric vehicles is destroying lives in Indonesia appeared first on Climate Home News.
Nickel mining for electric vehicles is destroying lives in Indonesia
When carbon dioxide (CO2) is released from a factory or power plant, the gas can be captured and permanently stored underground, preventing it from driving climate change.
This is the idea underpinning carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technology that is at the heart of many nations’ net-zero plans.
Influential organisations, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), describe CCS as “critical” for cutting emissions from key sectors – and for helping to avoid dangerous global warming.
In particular, capturing CO2 is seen as one of the only viable options for decarbonising some of the world’s highest-emitting industries, such as cement production.
The UK, for example, has committed to investing as much as £21.7bn over the coming decades in its nascent CCS industry, as part of the nation’s net-zero strategy.
Yet, in the UK and elsewhere, there has been a backlash against plans for CCS.
Citing high costs, ties to the fossil-fuel industry and a “history of poor performance”, critics describe CCS as a “dangerous distraction” or a “false climate solution”.
Time and again, the outlook for the roll-out of CCS has been scaled back, as the technology has failed to deliver as quickly as expected – and as policy support has wavered.
Furthermore, critics state that the technology remains “unproven” on the scale required to make a meaningful impact on global emissions.
In this Q&A, Carbon Brief explores the role CCS is expected to play in achieving net-zero, its record to date and the reasons it has been criticised, using the UK as an example.
What is CCS?
CCS involves capturing CO2 emissions released from a large source, such as a gas power plant or a cement factory.
The CO2 is separated from the facility’s exhaust stream, generally using a chemical solvent, before being compressed into a liquid and transported via pipeline or vehicle. The CO2 is then stored by injecting it into underground reservoirs, such as depleted oil fields or saline aquifers.
The term “CCUS” is sometimes also used, referring to the “utilisation” of CO2 to make products, including fertilisers, fuels or building materials. Such uses do not necessarily lead to permanent emissions cuts, as the CO2 can end up later being released back into the atmosphere.
(“CCS” is used in this Q&A, unless quoting another organisation that specifically refers to “CCUS”.)
The infographic below shows the stages of capturing CO2 and transporting it to be either stored or used in other applications.
Carbon capture technology was originally rolled out at US and Canadian oil wells in the early 1970s as a way to achieve “enhanced oil recovery”. This involves injecting captured CO2 into depleted wells – a process that stores CO2, but also helps to extract more oil.
This remains, by far, the most significant end use for captured CO2 worldwide, with around three-quarters of it used for this purpose.
Moreover, most of the CO2 currently captured is a by-product of gas purification – the process by which fossil fuels such as methane are separated from other, unwanted substances. Selling this CO2 can make such gas projects more economically viable.
Therefore, as shown in the chart below, which is based on International Energy Agency (IEA) data, the majority of CO2 that is both captured and used today helps the fossil-fuel industry to extract and sell more oil and gas.
CCS was first proposed as a way to deal with CO2 emissions in a 1976 academic article, which imagined injecting the captured gas into the ocean.
It is only since the early 2000s that CCS has gained traction as a proposed climate solution, with a 2005 “special report” by the IPCC exploring the topic. At that time, the authors note there were just three small-scale projects trying to capture and permanently store CO2.
Installing CCS at factories or power plants and permanently storing the CO2 would mean that, in theory, such facilities could continue using fossil fuels without contributing to climate change.
Such applications are often mentioned alongside two related technologies, both of which could be used to “suck” CO2 out of the atmosphere and, thus, deliver “negative emissions”.
One is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Crops absorb CO2 as they grow and BECCS involves a power plant burning these crops, then storing the resulting CO2.
The other technology is direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS).
These technologies are classed as “CO2 removal”, as they involve absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere using plants or machines and then storing it permanently.
By contrast, CCS installed at a factory is considered a way to avoid CO2 emitted by that specific facility from entering the atmosphere. This Q&A focuses on such applications, which account for the vast majority of existing and planned CCS.
How much CCS capacity has been built so far?
As of February 2026, there were a total of 75 operational CCS projects around the world. As noted above, almost all of them are at fossil-fuel extraction and processing sites, according to the IEA’s database.
Together, these projects capture 62.5m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) each year. This is equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of Ecuador.
(This compares with the 22 CCS projects, promising to capture 40MtCO2 annually, that were operational or under construction as of 2014.)
As the chart below shows, the amount of CO2 currently being captured and stored is a tiny fraction of the total emissions from fossil-fuel use.
In a 2020 report, the IEA explained that the “story of CCUS has largely been one of unmet expectations: its potential to mitigate climate change has been recognised for decades, but deployment has been slow”.
A wave of interest in CCS in the 2000s, largely from countries in Europe and North America, focused on enabling coal power plants to continue operating with lower emissions.
This interest largely petered out, as plummeting renewable energy costs weakened the case for coal plants with CCS. Today, there are only seven operating CCS-coal plants worldwide – five in China, one in the US and one in Canada.
Yet the Paris Agreement in 2015 – and the national net-zero targets that followed – highlighted the need for deep emissions cuts in sectors that previously expected to continue emitting for decades. This, once again, has fuelled interest in the use of CCS.
In recent years, there has also been growing interest in producing low-carbon “blue” hydrogen from gas with CCS.
Hydrogen is widely seen as key for decarbonising certain sectors – particularly in industry – but analyses suggest that it may be difficult to make sufficient “green” hydrogen using renewable power on the timescales required.
As the map below shows, most CCS capacity is based in the US and Canada, with other major fossil-fuel producers such as Norway, Brazil and the Gulf states also contributing.
A surge of projects have entered the global CCS pipeline in recent years. According to the IEA, 93.7MtCO2 of capture or storage capacity is under construction as of February 2026 and another 1,279.6MtCO2 is in the “planning” stages.
“Planned” projects include any initiative at early concept, feasibility or engineering study stages and the industry has a long history of projects being cancelled or delayed.
Nevertheless, this pipeline of projects could lead to a large expansion of facilities dedicated to permanent CO2 storage that does not involve extracting more oil.
The planned projects – if they are realised – would also include significant growth in sectors where CCS is virtually non-existent, such as steel, hydrogen and cement production, as shown in the chart below.
What role is CCS expected to play in reaching net-zero?
It will be impossible to stop dangerous climate change unless the world reaches net-zero emissions, according to the IPCC. The amount of global warming – and whether the Paris Agreement temperature target can be met – depends on when net-zero is reached.
Many global pathways that have been set out for achieving net-zero, including a majority of the IPCC-assessed pathways where global warming is limited to 1.5C, rely on the use of CCS at fossil-fuel plants and industrial sites.
“These models have been quite instrumental in bringing CCS back onto the agenda,” Lina Lefstad, an ecological economist at Lund University, tells Carbon Brief.
Influential organisations relying on CCS in their net-zero scenarios range from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) through to the oil company Shell. The IEA has stated that net-zero would be “virtually impossible” without CCS.
These scenarios often include 10s to 100s of times more CCS capacity being built in the coming decades. The IEA incl