Sorovako, located on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, is one of the largest nickel mines in the world. Nickel is an invisible part of many everyday objects: it disappears in stainless steel, heating elements in household appliances and electrodes in batteries. It was formed over two million years ago when hills around Sorovako began to appear along active faults. Laterites – soils rich in iron oxide and nickel – were formed as a result of the relentless erosion of tropical rains. When I drove the scooter up the hill, the ground immediately changed color to red with blood-orange stripes. I could see the nickel plant itself, a dusty brown rough chimney the size of a city. Small truck tires the size of a car are piled up. Roads cut through steep red hills and huge nets prevent landslides. Mining company Mercedes-Benz double-decker buses carry workers. The company’s flag is flown by the company’s pickup trucks and off-road ambulances. The earth is hilly and pitted, and the flat red earth is folded into a zigzag trapezoid. The site is guarded by barbed wire, gates, traffic lights and corporate police patrolling a concession area almost the size of London.
The mine is operated by PT Vale, which is partly owned by the governments of Indonesia and Brazil, with stakes held by Canadian, Japanese and other multinational corporations. Indonesia is the world’s largest nickel producer, and Vale is the second largest nickel miner after Norilsk Nickel, a Russian company developing Siberian deposits. In March, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, nickel prices doubled in a day and trading on the London Metal Exchange was suspended for a week. Events like this make people like Elon Musk wonder where their nickel came from. In May, he met with Indonesian President Joko Widodo to discuss a possible “partnership”. He’s interested because long-range electric vehicles require nickel. A Tesla battery contains about 40 kilograms. Unsurprisingly, the Indonesian government is very interested in moving to electric vehicles and plans to expand mining concessions. In the meantime, Vale intends to build two new smelters in Sorovaco and upgrade one of them.
Nickel mining in Indonesia is a relatively new development. In the early 20th century, the colonial government of the Dutch East Indies began to take an interest in its “peripheral possessions”, the islands other than Java and Madura, which made up the bulk of the archipelago. In 1915, Dutch mining engineer Eduard Abendanon reported that he had discovered a nickel deposit at Sorovako. Twenty years later, HR “Flat” Elves, a geologist with the Canadian company Inco, arrived and dug a test hole. In Ontario, Inco uses nickel to make coins and parts for weapons, bombs, ships and factories. Elves’ attempts to expand into Sulawesi were thwarted by the Japanese occupation of Indonesia in 1942. Until the return of Inco in the 1960s, nickel was largely unaffected.
By winning the Sorovaco concession in 1968, Inco hoped to profit from an abundance of cheap labor and lucrative export contracts. The plan was to build a smelter, a dam to feed it, and a quarry, and to bring in Canadian personnel to manage it all. Inco wanted a safe enclave for their managers, a well-guarded North American suburb in the Indonesian forest. To build it, they hired members of the Indonesian spiritual movement Subud. Its leader and founder is Muhammad Subuh, who worked as an accountant in Java in the 1920s. He claims that one night, when he was walking, a blinding ball of light fell on his head. This happened to him every night for several years, and, according to him, it opened “the connection between the divine power that fills the entire universe and the human soul.” By the 1950s, he had come to the attention of John Bennett, a British fossil fuel explorer and follower of the mystic George Gurdjieff. Bennett invited Subuh to England in 1957 and he returned to Jakarta with a new group of European and Australian students.
In 1966, the movement created an inept engineering firm called International Design Consultants, which built schools and office buildings in Jakarta (it also designed the master plan for Darling Harbor in Sydney). He proposes an extractivist utopia in Sorovako, an enclave separate from the Indonesians, far from the chaos of the mines, but fully provided for by them. In 1975, a gated community with a supermarket, tennis courts and a golf club for foreign workers was built a few kilometers from Sorovako. Private police guard the perimeter and entrance to the supermarket. Inco supplies electricity, water, air conditioners, telephones and imported food. According to Katherine May Robinson, an anthropologist who conducted fieldwork there between 1977 and 1981, “women in Bermuda shorts and buns would drive to the supermarket to buy frozen pizza and then stop for snacks and drink coffee outdoors. The air-conditioned room on the way home is a “modern hoax” from a friend’s house.
The enclave is still guarded and patrolled. Now high-ranking Indonesian leaders live there, in a house with a well-kept garden. But public spaces are overgrown with weeds, cracked cement, and rusty playgrounds. Some of the bungalows have been abandoned and forests have taken their place. I was told that this void is the result of Vale’s acquisition of Inco in 2006 and the move from full-time to contract work and a more mobile workforce. The distinction between the suburbs and Sorovako is now purely class-based: managers live in the suburbs, workers live in the city.
The concession itself is inaccessible, with almost 12,000 square kilometers of wooded mountains surrounded by fences. Several gates are manned and the roads are patrolled. The actively mined area – almost 75 square kilometers – is fenced with barbed wire. One night I was riding my motorcycle uphill and stopped. I couldn’t see the heap of slag hidden behind the ridge, but I watched the remains of the smelt, which was still close to lava temperature, flow down the mountain. An orange light came on, and then a cloud rose up in the darkness, spreading out until it was blown away by the wind. Every few minutes, a new man-made eruption lights up the sky.
The only way non-employees can sneak up on the mine is through Lake Matano, so I took a boat. Then Amos, who lived on the shore, led me through the pepper fields until we reached the foot of what was once a mountain and is now a hollow shell, an absence. Sometimes you can make a pilgrimage to the place of origin, and perhaps this is where part of the nickel comes from in the items that contributed to my travels: cars, planes, scooters, laptops, phones.
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