SPECIAL REPORT: To build electric cars, manufacturers need to mine nickel. To dig up more nickel, a mining company plans to bulldoze a section of pristine rainforest. The “ethical dilemma” of when promising tech results in environmental harm:
With the demand for nickel expected to grow to at least 10 times what it is now by 2030, experts say companies will have no choice but to expand their mining operations, impacting more people like Bartolome and more places like the island paradise of Palawan. Located between the South China and the Sulu seas, Palawan is known as the last frontier of the Philippines.
NBC News reviewed corporate reports from the Japanese mining giant Sumitomo Metal Mining to track the processed nickel through refineries in Japan, where it is converted into nickel cobalt aluminum oxide cathode material for Panasonic’s lithium ion batteries. The town is now considered a first-class municipality, he said, a designation that puts it just below a city. Among the town’s major upgrades: a water system that Nickel Asia paid for at the request of government officials.The mine began operations in the mid-1970s after the Rio Tuba Nickel Mining Corp. secured the permission of the Philippines government. At the time, the nickel ore pulled out of the earth was mainly used in the production of stainless steel.
“You are fundamentally having to move more ore out of the ground, and obviously that has a bigger footprint from a mining perspective,” said Andrew Miller, chief operating officer at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, which tracks the supply chain for electric vehicles.The Rio Tuba mine doubled in size between 1987 and 2020. Satellite imagery shows its growth. Alarmed by the potential consequences, environmental and Indigenous rights groups marshaled their resources.
Two years later, the nonprofit environmental group, Friends of the Earth Japan, announced that it completed an environmental field study in Palawan that it said found unsafe levels of hexavalent chromium, a cancer-causing chemical that was at the center of the Julia Roberts film “Erin Brockovich,” in one of the rivers near the mine.
Multiple people who live near the area said in interviews last month that locals stopped using the river and the creek for drinking water years ago after the water developed a reddish hue. He said Rio Tuba conducted a 2018-2019 study with the National Institute of Geological Sciences at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, that showed hexavalent chromium in surface waters exiting the mine were at low levels while the metal in groundwater was generally undetected.
Baylon emphasized that his company takes a series of steps to mitigate the mine’s impact on the land, including a sophisticated process of planting trees over the mined area. He noted that Rio Tuba has received multiple honors, including the best practice in minerals mining“We cannot castigate a whole industry because there are some irresponsible operators,” he says. “Life has been a series of trade-offs, and we're still trading off.
In 2019, Rio Tuba scored a major victory when the Philippines Mines and Geosciences Bureau approved its application to renew and amend its agreement with the government over the scope of its mining operations. The company secured the right to mine an additional 3,548 hectares of forest [13 square miles], which would more than quadruple the size of its present footprint.
“We ourselves are fighting each other,” Silnay said. “Before we didn't go through this. It’s sad. It’s as if we don’t understand each other.”Electric cars help the environment … at a cost
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