实际流转的物质
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.
- 材料
- Nickel
- 品种
- Saprolite laterite ore, roughly 2% nickel, low cobalt
- 起点
- New Caledonia — The nickel-rich massifs of Grande Terre, a fragment of ancient ocean floor pushed above sea level
逐步追踪，逐境跨越
New Caledonia · Grande Terre 持有方 SLN, Prony and KNS operations (矿业公司)
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.
为何选择此地: 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 持有方 Operators (矿业公司)
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.
其余部分的去向: 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.
为何选择此地: Drying has to happen before shipping or smelting, and the cheapest place to do it is at the mine.
New Caledonia · Doniambo smelter, Nouméa 持有方 Société Le Nickel (精炼商)
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.
其余部分的去向: Almost everything else is slag. The nickel was never more than about 2% of what came out of the ground.
为何选择此地: 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 持有方 Steelmakers (制造商)
To a stainless mill
Ferronickel is shipped as ingot or shot directly to stainless steel producers.
为何选择此地: Ferronickel has exactly one customer: the stainless steel industry. It cannot be redirected to batteries.
Japan · Stainless mill 持有方 Steelmakers (制造商)
Stainless steel
Melted with chromium and iron into austenitic stainless — sinks, cutlery, chemical plant, architectural cladding.
为何选择此地: Two-thirds of all nickel still goes into stainless steel. The battery story is the newer and smaller half of the market.
本文为示例演算，以公开的典型产率和回收率对既定起始量逐步推算，各比例可供核验；这不是某批具体货物的记录。路线事实——途经哪些国家、经历哪些工序，以及为何该材料不能在其他地方简单处理——均来源于公开报道。