Green Batteries Built On Dirty Dealings In Indonesia

In Kawasi, the village now ringed by Harita's plant, residents say jobs and supply contracts were routed through the village head. A 2020 company security memo says he identified and reported residents suspected of leading protests, so that they and their families could be kept off the company's payroll. The same official earned about $304,000 selling land to the company.

Higher up, a senior director wrote in 2016 that Harita was building its first smelter without a building permit because of its close ties with local officials, the same documents show. He also drafted a government decision on hazardous waste storage himself, cutting a line that required a field check by law, the documents show.

The same approach, the documents show, is used in Harita's handling of alleged damage. A 2025 OCCRP report found that the company's own monitoring had recorded chromium-6 in local water above legal limits for about a decade.

Most Kawasi residents have since been moved to a company-built“eco-village.” The few who stayed deal with power cuts and with flooding whenever the mine's sediment pond overflows.

Obi's nickel is marketed as a clean-energy metal, yet Obi runs largely on coal. According to the climate group Market Forces, Harita operates about 890 megawatts of captive coal power on the island, with another 1.2 gigawatts under construction.

Market Forces estimates the operation emitted 10.87 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2024, close to 1% of Indonesia's national emissions that year. Earlier this year, Harita removed detailed coal-capacity figures from its website after Market Forces cited them in a complaint to the Singapore Exchange, Eco-Business reported.

To be sure, Obi is no outlier. A 2024 study by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and our institute, CELIOS, found that the economic benefit from nickel processing peaks around the fifth year, at about $4 billion, then declines as pollution takes its toll. The study also estimated that the resulting health damage could cost at least 3,800 lives a year.

Harita reportedly did not respond to OCCRP's questions about the alleged payments or Asia Times' request for comment. The company has previously rejected reports of water pollution, saying its tests met national standards.

It also points to an ongoing audit by the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance. That audit should now weigh these OCCRP-leaked documents in its assessments.

Indonesia produces about two-thirds of the world's mined nickel, according to the US Geological Survey, and much of the processing is financed by Chinese capital. On Obi, Harita's battery-grade refineries were built with Lygend, a Ningbo-based firm listed in Hong Kong since 2022.

The partnership has also entrenched polluting coal-fired power. In 2022, the Chinese contractor Tianjin Electric Power Construction won a deal to build four 380-megawatt coal units on Obi for the Harita and Lygend projects, only months after Chinese President Xi Jinping told the United Nations that China would stop building new coal power plants abroad.

Nothing in the OCCRP's leak links Lygend to the payments. But Chinese investors often treat land, permits and local consent as the local partner's responsibility. Beijing's own 2022 guidelines for overseas projects ask Chinese companies to consult affected communities and gather their views.