CNN Indonesia
Tuesday, 16 Jan 2024 21:17 IWST
National Team Co-Captain Anies Baswedan-Muhaimin Iskandar Thomas Lembong said Jokowi’s nickel downstreaming threatened the price of this commodity. (CNN Indonesia/Bump).
Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —
Co-Captain of the Winning National Team Anies Baswedan-Muhaimin Iskandar (AMIN National Team) Thomas Lembong mentioned the downstream project nickel President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) is in danger of failing.
The reason is, he said that global nickel prices had fallen by around 30 percent in the last 12 months. Then he predicted that nickel stocks in the world would experience the largest surplus in history.
“So with the intensive construction of smelters in Indonesia, we are flooding the world with nickel. Prices are falling, there is an oversupply situation,” said the man who is familiarly called Tom in a video uploaded to the YouTube channel. Total Politicsquoted Tuesday (16/1).
Then, Tom explained that because the government was so militant and confrontational towards foreign customers, it made them afraid. This made Indonesia lose confidence and look for other options to make electric car batteries.
“Finally they looked for other options, they made a battery material formulation that did not use nickel,” he said further.
Tom then gave the example of Tesla, which does not use electric vehicle batteries whose raw material is nickel.
“So 100 percent of all Tesla cars made in China use batteries that contain 0 percent nickel and 0 percent cobalt. So the batteries are lithium iron phosphate (LFP). So they use iron, they use phosphate, they still use lithium, but no longer “We use nickel, we no longer use cobalt,” he said.
Previously, Tom had said that Jokowi’s nickel downstream policy did not take market conditions into account. As a result, many car manufacturers are now abandoning nickel and looking for other raw materials for electric batteries.
“This is called the government’s policy (downstreaming) which does not take into account market realities. No customer (market) wants to be held hostage (to the ban on Indonesian nickel exports), they will definitely look for other solutions that are developing, which compete with the solution we offer, namely nickel,” claimed Tom. in the Public Discussion of the Vice Presidential Candidate Team at the CSIS Auditorium, Central Jakarta, Wednesday (6/12).
If Jokowi’s concept continues to persist, Tom believes that Indonesian nickel will increasingly be abandoned or ostracized globally.
He said that nickel was the main material for batteries and electric cars in the 2015-2017 era, reaching 70 percent of all electric vehicles (EV) in the world. However, according to him, in 6-7 years from now batteries that use nickel will only make up 30 percent of the number of electric cars in the world.
Even so, he said that Anies-Muhaimin would not suddenly stop what President Jokowi had done. If AMIN wins in 2024, Tom said that his party would let the market mechanism work.
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2024-01-16 14:17:35
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