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New Caledonia sits on one of the largest nickel resources on Earth and has smelted it locally for over a century. Its ore is the saprolite kind — good for metal, poor for batteries — so it goes into stainless steel rather than into cells. The economics turn almost entirely on the price of power on a small island.
- 소재
- Nickel
- 유형
- Saprolite laterite ore, roughly 2% nickel, low cobalt
- 출발지
- New Caledonia — The nickel-rich massifs of Grande Terre, a fragment of ancient ocean floor pushed above sea level
단계별, 국경별
New Caledonia · Grande Terre 보유자 SLN, Prony and KNS operations (채굴업체)
Scraping the hillside
Laterite sits at the surface, so it is stripped with excavators rather than blasted. The soft, deeply weathered ore needs almost no drilling.
왜 이곳인가: Millions of years of tropical rain on ultramafic rock made this deposit. It cannot be made anywhere the climate and the bedrock do not agree.
New Caledonia · Doniambo and mine-site plants 보유자 Operators (채굴업체)
Drying and screening
Laterite arrives wet — often a third water by weight. It is dried and screened before it can be fed to a furnace.
나머지는 어떻게 되었는가: 300 tonnes of that shipment was water. This is why laterite is almost never exported raw over long distances — you would be paying freight on rain.
왜 이곳인가: Drying has to happen before shipping or smelting, and the cheapest place to do it is at the mine.
New Caledonia · Doniambo smelter, Nouméa 보유자 Société Le Nickel (정련업체)
An electric furnace on an island
Calcined in a rotary kiln, then smelted in an electric arc furnace to ferronickel — an iron-nickel alloy that goes straight into stainless steel.
나머지는 어떻게 되었는가: Almost everything else is slag. The nickel was never more than about 2% of what came out of the ground.
왜 이곳인가: Smelting at home keeps the value and the jobs on the island. It also means every tonne of metal carries the cost of island power, which is the industry's permanent problem here.
Japan · Japan, Korea or Europe 보유자 Steelmakers (제조사)
To a stainless mill
Ferronickel is shipped as ingot or shot directly to stainless steel producers.
왜 이곳인가: Ferronickel has exactly one customer: the stainless steel industry. It cannot be redirected to batteries.
Japan · Stainless mill 보유자 Steelmakers (제조사)
Stainless steel
Melted with chromium and iron into austenitic stainless — sinks, cutlery, chemical plant, architectural cladding.
왜 이곳인가: Two-thirds of all nickel still goes into stainless steel. The battery story is the newer and smaller half of the market.
이것은 작업 예시이다. 공표된 출발 수량을 공표된 일반적인 수율 및 회수율에 따라 추적한 것이므로 비율은 검증 가능하다. 특정 선적 기록이 아니다. 경로 사실—어느 나라, 어떤 공정, 그리고 왜 해당 소재를 다른 곳에서 처리할 수 없는지—은 공개 보고를 바탕으로 정리되었다.