Indonesia gets bad news on EV batterys

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SilverStacker

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A nickle mining powerhouse gets the bad news. https://asiatimes.com/2026/07/byd-battery-breakthrough-crashes-indonesias-nickel-cartel-dream/

Actually Ive been reading less and less of the need for silver in future EV battery production as Industry explores more affordable ways of storing energy. Of course where silver shines is as a thin layer over the solid electrolytes which are prone to developing cracks when charging which over time cause the battery to fail.

Of course there are other metals ,minerals, and Industrial techniques with skin in the game. Silver, whatever its usage and achievements in EV battery's, is just in an already tight and expensive market with limited supplies available and a whole lot of Industrial uses already in play. Indonesia would have been wise to adjust to this formula instead of so aggressively advocating its nickle mining Industry, along with the Philippines, as the future of EV battery production. Because the truth is modern Industry has a lot of capability in finding acceptable alternatives to minerals and chemistry that, at scale, just don't produce an acceptable bottom line.

In other words just because its best in the laboratory doesn't mean it will automatically be put into production. Jakarta found this out the hard way
 
While Silver is still an industrial metal it will eventually follow where Gold leads.
 
The Island of New Caledonia in the south Pacific can't be to happy either. They have rich nickle deposits and the metal, along with tourism, is pretty much their entire economy. And to make it worse they have another problem, that of sharks eating their tourists and tourist trade because their fishing Industry is chucking to much fish guts in the water.

Nickle is so important as a strategic metal that the Battle of the Coral Sea was fought, among other reasons, to keep the Empire of Japan out of New Caledonia and its nickle mines. Nickle/steel alloys were vastly superior to steel alone in ways I wont bother to mention and the Allies had the Canadian nickle mines "90% to 95% of the worlds nickle" to draw on while the Axis scrambled for it.
 
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