In September, 2020, Elon Musk and a Tesla executive named Drew Baglino put on matching T-shirts and took the stage in a California parking lot. To mark what the company called Battery Day, Tesla had gathered an audience of shareholders, who were social distancing by sitting separately in gleaming electric cars. Some of the company’s new batteries, Musk and Baglino announced, contained far more nickel than previous models; as a result, they could travel farther, and at far less cost, on a single charge. “Increasing nickel is a goal of ours and, really, everybody’s in the battery industry,” Baglino said. The metal would accelerate the transition away from dirty combustion engines, the largest source of carbon emissions in the United States. “I actually spoke with the C.E.O.s of the biggest mining companies in the world and said, ‘Please make more nickel,’ ” Musk said. Throughout the presentation, attendees applauded by laying on their horns.
But one of the next largest producers is tiny New Caledonia, a French overseas territory in the Pacific which is less than a hundredth of the size of Indonesia. “I have never seen nickel deposits like we have in New Caledonia,” Miguel Ate, a geologist from the territory’s Indigenous Kanak community, told me. “My island is four hundred kilometres long by sixty kilometres wide. It’s all nickel.” Ate, who works for a mining company, was exaggerating—but not by much. About a third of the soil on the country’s main island, Grand Terre, contains the metal, giving New Caledonia, according to some recent estimates, more than a quarter of the world’s nickel resources.
In 2021, Tesla struck a five-year deal to buy up to a third of the nickel from Goro, one of New Caledonia’s largest mines. The New York Times touted the move as “a path to begin sidestepping China” and, in the best-case scenario, an opportunity to improve weak environmental and labor standards in the mining industry. At a time when the U.S. is penalizing electric automakers that buy Chinese nickel from Indonesia, and also negotiating a trade agreement with the E.U. which could extend generous subsidies to nickel from New Caledonia, the territory could play a crucial role in the green-energy transition.
The ecological richness of New Caledonia is one of the lasting mysteries of natural history. High concentrations of nickel are usually toxic to plants, but here evolution took an unusual path. In the course of tens of millions of years, the island’s infertile soils came to nurture a flora unlike any other in the world. In 1976, a paper in Science introduced a new term, “hyper-accumulator,” to describe a species of New Caledonian tree that produced mint-green latex; more than a quarter of the latex, by dry weight, was found to be nickel, “easily the highest nickel concentration ever found in living material.” Instead of killing plants, the metal seemed to be interacting with organisms and steering their development in curious ways. A 2009 study, which measured the number of unique vascular plants growing in different regions of the globe, gave New Caledonia “by far the highest value,” with thousands of species found nowhere else. Scientists still discover, on average, a new plant species there every month.
