Что фактически перемещается
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.
- Материал
- Nickel
- Разновидность
- Saprolite laterite ore, roughly 2% nickel, low cobalt
- Начальная точка
- New Caledonia — The nickel-rich massifs of Grande Terre, a fragment of ancient ocean floor pushed above sea level
Шаг за шагом, граница за границей
New Caledonia · Grande Terre хранится у SLN, Prony and KNS operations (Горнодобывающая компания)
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.
Почему именно здесь: 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 хранится у Operators (Горнодобывающая компания)
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.
Что произошло с остатком: 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.
Почему именно здесь: Drying has to happen before shipping or smelting, and the cheapest place to do it is at the mine.
New Caledonia · Doniambo smelter, Nouméa хранится у Société Le Nickel (Рафинировщик)
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.
Что произошло с остатком: Almost everything else is slag. The nickel was never more than about 2% of what came out of the ground.
Почему именно здесь: 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 хранится у Steelmakers (Производитель)
To a stainless mill
Ferronickel is shipped as ingot or shot directly to stainless steel producers.
Почему именно здесь: Ferronickel has exactly one customer: the stainless steel industry. It cannot be redirected to batteries.
Japan · Stainless mill хранится у Steelmakers (Производитель)
Stainless steel
Melted with chromium and iron into austenitic stainless — sinks, cutlery, chemical plant, architectural cladding.
Почему именно здесь: Two-thirds of all nickel still goes into stainless steel. The battery story is the newer and smaller half of the market.
Это разработанный пример. Он прослеживает заявленное исходное количество материала через типовые опубликованные выходы и коэффициенты извлечения, поэтому соотношения поддаются проверке; это не запись о конкретной отгрузке. Данные о маршруте — какие страны, какие процессы и почему материал не может быть переработан в другом месте — собраны из общедоступных источников.