Nickel · Ni
battery_metal · primary
Stainless-steel mainstay turned battery metal. Indonesia's RKEF + HPAL build-out has roughly tripled global mine output since 2018, making it the most concentrated supply story in critical minerals. Class 1 (battery-grade) flows through Canada, Norway, and Finland after Russian sanctions tightened in 2022.
Bottom line
Nickel sits on 4 federal critical-minerals lists; mine supply is highly concentrated (HHI 0.52, 2023), led by 🇮🇩 Indonesia at 70% of output. The US is 41% net import-reliant (2025). Prices fell 11% over the past year (-5%/yr over 4y). 3 active export controls touch its trade.
At a glance
Headline indicators
Price · 2026
17,757$/mt
World Bank Pink Sheet
Price trend
-11% 1Y
-5%/yr · 4Y CAGR
US net import reliance · 2025
41%
Mine production HHI
0.52
Highly concentrated · 2023
From ore to use
lifecycle flow
- 01Reserves
140.0Mt
Indonesia leads · 44% share
- 02Production
3.8Mt
Indonesia top · 2024
- 03Trade
89.0Kt
net importer · 2025
- 04Stocks
25.0Kt
year-end · 2025
- 05Consumption
130.0Kt
Consumption: Reported, secondary, purchased scrap · 2025
Coverage
Data coverage notes
- datedMaterial-flow analysis is historical - All 5164 material-flow records date to 2005 or earlier (Yale STAF era). They describe the anthropogenic cycle of that period, not today's system.
- datedExport-restriction inventory ends 2020 - The OECD industrial-raw-materials inventory (vendored snapshot) reports HS-line measures only through 2020; restrictions enacted since are not reflected in the measure table.
- narrowConsumption geography is single-economy (United States) - Reported consumption covers one economy only - the world usage split must be read from trade flows, not from a consumption table.
Methodology
The method, on nickel's own data
How strata observes nickel's supply chain and estimates its demand honestly - the full method, every figure below read live from this dossier. Expand the walkthrough
01 · The lens
The whole nickel life cycle
Strata maps every commodity onto one eight-stage scaffold, ore to end use, so any two are directly comparable. But a real commodity forks - some routes skip stages - so we read this scaffold three ways: what the stages are, how this commodity actually travels them, and how much of each we cover.
One scaffold, every commodity - so any two line up
Strata maps every commodity onto the same eight stages, ore to end use. That is what makes copper, nickel and lithium directly comparable - but a real commodity rarely walks all eight in a straight line. It forks, and some routes skip stages. The primer decodes the scaffold; the journey and routes below show how this one actually travels it.
How nickel is made - inputs, outputs & routes
The metal flows left to right. At each stage something is added (from above) and something leaves (below). The three tracks show which stages each route uses - and which it skips.
Hover a stage to read what happens there - click to pin it open. Teal = added at that step, gold = leaves at that step; the coloured tracks are the three routes.
Recycling loops old scrap back into the chain - it re-enters downstream, it is not a new-metal stage. Grades are indicative; sources are linked below.
›Full stage-by-stage detail
Nickel does not travel one line - it splits early into two ore families that take different routes and rejoin at the end. Sulfide ore is concentrated, smelted, and refined to pure metal; laterite ore (~70% of world supply today) is either smelted straight into stainless-grade metal or acid-leached for battery chemicals. Below is the whole scaffold; the forks show which stages each route actually uses.
- Minestage 1
Nickel is dug out of the ground as one of two very different rocks: hard sulfide ore, or soft, near-surface laterite (weathered tropical soil).
inorebody in the groundoutrun-of-mine ore - sulfide ~1-3% Ni, or laterite ~1-2% Ni - Concentratestage 2
Sulfide ore is crushed and floated in water so the nickel-rich grains bubble to the top, upgrading it ~10x. Laterite has no separable nickel grains, so it cannot be concentrated - it goes forward whole.
inrun-of-mine oreoutsulfide concentrate 10-20% Ni (laterite: only screened, stays ~1-2%) - Smelterstage 3
The feed is melted at ~1,400-1,600 C. Sulfide concentrate becomes a nickel 'matte'; laterite becomes either ferronickel/nickel pig iron (an iron-nickel alloy that goes straight to stainless) or a matte.
inconcentrate, or saprolite laterite oreoutmatte 45-78% Ni · ferronickel 20-40% Ni · nickel pig iron 4-15% Ni - Refinerystage 4
Matte is electro-refined or gas-refined into pure Class-1 nickel metal; separately, iron-rich limonite laterite is dissolved in hot acid (HPAL) to pull out a nickel-cobalt hydroxide for the battery chain.
innickel matte, or limonite laterite ore + sulfuric acidoutClass-1 nickel metal >=99.8% Ni · mixed hydroxide (MHP) 35-45% Ni - Chemicalstage 5
For batteries, nickel (as MHP or dissolved metal) is turned into nickel sulfate crystals - the exact salt a battery cathode plant needs.
inMHP or Class-1 metal + sulfuric acidoutbattery-grade nickel sulfate (NiSO4.6H2O), 22.3% Ni - Components (first use)stage 6
Nickel is built into things: melted with iron and chromium into stainless steel, co-precipitated into battery cathode powder, or alloyed into jet-engine superalloys.
inferronickel/NPI, Class-1 metal, or nickel sulfateoutstainless steel (~8% Ni) · battery cathode (NMC/NCA) · superalloys - Recyclingstage 7
Old stainless steel and spent batteries are collected and re-melted or leached, returning their nickel to the chain instead of mining new metal. This box is dashed because it feeds back in, it does not add new metal.
instainless scrap · battery black massoutrecycled nickel units · MHP-equivalent for new batteries - Final usestage 8
Finished nickel ends up in things people buy - kitchen sinks and buildings (stainless), electric-car batteries, and aircraft engines.
instainless, batteries, alloysoutconstruction & goods 66% · batteries 14% · alloys/superalloys 12% (2024)
grades & routes sourced from: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2025 - Nickel · Nickel Institute - Nickel industry (processing series, Parts 1-6) · INSG - The World Nickel Factbook 2024 · worldstainless - The Global Life Cycle of Stainless Steels · LME - Primary Nickel special contract rules (99.80% Class 1)
The same chain, sized by how much of each stage we map
Band height is facilities strata maps; a stage figure links to its source. Full value chain (companies + control) →
Coverage along the chain - covered, partial, or gap
| commodity | Extraction | Refining | First use (manufacturing) | Use | Recycling |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| nickel | covered | covered | partial | covered | covered |
hover a chip for the stage headline · a "gap" chip is the product stating where its own coverage ends - not a blank we hide
02 · The membrane
Observed vs estimated - never blurred
Two kinds of numbers exist in strata, and they are visually and structurally distinct everywhere they appear.
Reported by an authoritative source - USGS, BGS, ICSG, a company filing, a national agency. The row carries its citation; click it and you land on the publication.
Computed as observed activity × a verified material intensity. Always marked imputed, always shows BOTH ingredient sources, and expands to the full calculation on click.
The rule that holds the product together: a reader can always tell which of the two they are looking at - and when the data cannot support a number, we show nothing rather than a wrong number. Every observed row links to its publication; the full catalogue, ranked by authority, lives at /sources.
03 · Supply, observed
One tonne is not three tonnes
Sources publish production per chain stage. The same metal appears at every stage, so summing stages manufactures phantom supply. Strata keeps each stage as its own panel and never sums across them.
How do we know a row's stage? We don't infer it - the source reports it.
USGS and BGS publish production as separate statistical series per stage. Strata preserves each row's verbatim wording and only GROUPS that vocabulary into stage panels:
A row whose label fits no family lands in "Other forms" rather than being force-classified, and every row keeps its provenance - so any grouping is auditable back to the source line. That is the difference between a data-integrity rule and a model assumption. A free bonus: nickel's Class-1 vs Class-2 split (refined metal vs NPI / ferronickel) simply falls out of the panels, because the sources were reporting it all along.
04 · Reading the concentration bar
Concentration - a number you can decompose
Every screen carries an HHI concentration bar - the product's headline supply-risk number. It is not a black box: it is the sum of squared supply shares, computed separately at each stage, and we show the shares that build it.
The concentration bar on every screen is a single number - the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI): take each supplier's share of the total, square it, and add them up. It runs 0 (many equal suppliers) to 1 (one supplier owns everything). Squaring is the whole point - it makes a dominant producer count far more than several small ones. We show the shares, so you can rebuild the number yourself.
the top five shares alone already sum to 0.52; the dominant producer's square carries most of the index - which is exactly what a concentration measure should do
The bands
The ladder runs green to amber and stops there - an index is a description, not an alarm, so there is no red. A missing bar means not enough suppliers disclosed to compute it, never "low".
HHI of which stage?
Because a metal's mine geography is not its refinery geography, we compute HHI separately at each stage and never blend them. The mine map and the refinery map are different maps - and the gap between them is the single most useful supply-risk signal on the page.
- nickelmine0.52Highly concentratedrefining0.27ConcentratedIndonesia 42%
copper is the lesson: mining is spread across the Americas and Africa (diversified), but refining routes through China - the risk lives downstream, and only a per-stage HHI shows it. "% attributed" on the live rows sizes how much of the total the named suppliers cover; a "Rest of world" residual is kept in production sums but excluded from the index, so it can neither dilute nor inflate the concentration number.
05 · The resource base
Below the annual flow, what is in the ground
Production is a yearly rate; beneath it sit the reserves and mapped deposits that decide whether supply can scale to the transition's build-out.
The eight-stage scaffold starts at the mine; beneath it sits the resource base that decides long-run adequacy - economic reserves in the ground, and the wider inventory of mapped deposits. It is where "can supply scale to meet the build-out?" is actually answered.
- Indonesia62
- Australia25
- Brazil16
- Russia8
- New Caledonia7
million tonnes contained
A deposit count is not a supply map
Of 3,102 mapped deposits, 57% sit in United States - not because it holds the metal, but because the USGS MRDS inventory is exhaustive at home and sparser abroad. So we label the count as "how well mapped" and read the true supply leader (Indonesia) from reserves and production instead. It is the same rule as "a census share is not a world share", one layer deeper.
06 · Secondary supply
The scrap loop, kept on its own books
Recycling is a second source of metal - large for a mature base metal, negligible for a young battery metal - and it must never be summed into primary mine production.
The life-cycle infographic shows recycling as a stage; here is how much it actually provides, and why it stays on separate books. Recycled metal re-enters the chain downstream, so it must never be added to primary mine production - that would be the phantom-supply error again. How much a metal recycles is a first-order lever on the demand-vs-supply gap, and it varies enormously by metal.
alloy and stainless scrap recirculates at base-metal rates, shown as a rate not a share
End-of-life recycling rates come from Yale STAFDB; scrap flows and recycled-input share from USGS. The contrast is the point: a mature base metal recovers most of its scrap, while a young battery metal recovers almost none yet - which is exactly the lever a transition scenario tests.
07 · Facilities, not just countries
A statistic you can open into named plants
Country totals answer how much; the censuses answer which plants, owned by whom. Counts and China shares below are live from the plant census (operating facilities; shares are of the censused fleet, never presented as world shares).
- Smelting (census)72 · CN 62%
- Refining (census)68 · CN 24%
- Chemical processing (census)183 · CN 43%
plus the 98-plant Indonesia smelter census (CGS): 86% of operating Ni-equivalent capacity is China-linked
08 · From operator to ultimate owner
Who ultimately controls the plant
A census names the operator; resolution names the ultimate parent behind it - and weighs control by output, not just plant count.
The census names the plant; resolution names who ultimately controls it. Each operator is walked up its ownership chain - SEC EX-21 subsidiary lists and the CorpWatch control graph - to an ultimate parent, its home jurisdiction, and a control bloc. Blocs are relational: the same company is "Domestic" at home and "foreign" abroad, so control is measured against the asset's own country, not in the absolute.
Count the plants, or weigh the output?
A share by plant count and a share by capacity are different numbers, and the gap is the story. Across nickel's 19 resolved operations:
a minority of the plants, a near-majority of the metal - a few large Chinese-owned operations carry far more output than their headcount suggests. Only capacity-weighting sees it.
Output by control bloc
09 · Trade
The movement between supply and demand
Metal has to physically reach the user, through specific partners, exposed to specific measures - a supply-risk layer a production map never shows.
Metal is mined in one place and consumed in another, and the movement between is its own risk layer - the part a "who mines it" map never shows. Strata reads it from three public sources: USGS for net-import reliance, CEPII BACI bilateral flows for who ships to whom, and the OECD inventory for the measures that can choke a flow.
US demand met by imports (2025, USGS)
Primary nickel - single-partner dependence is a trade-partner HHI of its own
largest global shipper by value (BACI); 15 export measures in force, e.g. Madagascar other export measures
10 · The screening risk score
Every supply-risk layer, in one honest number
Concentration, dependency, control, restrictions and governance roll into a single 0 to 100 screening score - transparent in its parts, and honest when an input is missing.
Everything above - concentration, import dependency, who controls supply, export restrictions, governance - rolls into one 0 to 100 screening score. It is transparent (every component and its weight is shown) and honest when it cannot compute: a missing input reweights the rest rather than counting as zero, and a missing score means "not enough inputs", never "low risk".
- Mine-production concentrationw 0.2 · +13.5
- Midstream concentrationw 0.2 · +7.1
- Import-partner concentrationw 0.1 · +2.2
- Import dependency (net import reliance)w 0.1 · +4.1
- China control of supplyw 0.2 · +9.2
- Export restrictions + NTMsw 0.1 · +10.0
- Jurisdiction governance (WGI)w 0.1 · +5.5
The weights are fixed and published, not fit to an outcome. As a sanity check, the score is cross-referenced against the USGS supply-risk benchmark (OFR 2025-1047), where this commodity ranks 44 of 84 (Moderate). The bands run green to amber; there is no red.
11 · Demand, estimated honestly
Observed activity × verified intensity = implied demand
Take something you can count - tonnes of stainless melted, GWh of cells built, m2 of floorspace added - and multiply by how much metal each unit needs. Every coefficient is independently verified against its publication before use.
The coverage meter - how much of world nickel demand our lanes explain
the remainder is stated, not hidden - stock-dominated end uses (grid, buildings) are tracked as stocks, which are never summed with annual flows
12 · Supply meets demand
Does the transition outrun supply?
Sections 03 and 05 built the two halves - what the world makes, and what the transition needs. Here they meet: each implied-demand lane as a share of the world supply it draws on.
Supply was observed; demand was estimated. Here the two halves finally meet: divide an implied-demand lane by the world supply it draws on, and you get the one number a transition analyst actually wants - is this end use a rounding error, or a claim on a large slice of the world's metal?
- stainless steel58%of world annual production
- NMC batteries9.0%of world annual production
This is modeled demand over reported world supply - an estimate divided by an observation - so it inherits the estimate's caveat and always reads with a "≈". The denominator matters: an annual-flow lane (stainless melted this year) is measured against annual production, while a stock lane (copper standing in the grid) is measured against reserves. Comparing a stock to a flow is the phantom-supply error in reverse, so we never do it - which is why the demand meter earlier keeps stocks and flows on separate books.
13-14 · The GCAM link
GCAM models the transition; strata is its minerals layer
GCAM projects the energy transition but models no critical minerals. Strata turns GCAM's build-out into mineral demand - and exports the whole layer in GCAM's own input format, with both sources attached to every row.
The GCAM coupling is commodity-agnostic, so it lives on the methodology page: how strata couples to GCAM, and how GCAM answers live inside the product →
15 · The rules
What keeps it honest
194 cataloged sources; each figure is traceable to its publication - see /sources.
Wood Mackenzie, Benchmark, S&P are cite-only and flagged as procurement targets.
Yale-STAF material flows and 2008-vintage footprints render with a historical flag.
Plant-census statistics say so explicitly; world shares come from IEA / USGS series.
Provenance
Where this data comes from
- BGS World Mineral Statistics
- IEA Critical Minerals Dataset (CMO 2025)
insg factbook 2024
midstream_components_seed
oecd_export_restrictions_2026
ownership_control_seed
sec_edgar_ex96_pdf
- Statistics Canada Table 16-10-0022
- USGS DS-140 (constant 1998 USD)
- USGS DS-140 (nominal)
- USGS MCS (LME)
- USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026
- USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries World Data (legacy wide format, 2023-2025 vintages)
- USGS Minerals Yearbook OFR 2025-1047
- USGS Minerals Yearbook Vol III, reference year 2019
usgs_critmin_deposits_v2
usgs_deposit_gt
usgs_mine_waste
usgs_mrds_2016
usgs_world_phosphate
usmin_critical_deposits
- World Bank Pink Sheet
xu 2020 commat
24 sources · titles open the source card · url opens the publisher