Where does nickel come from?

Nickel comes from two chemically different families of ore, and that split explains most of what happens in the market. On this page nickel production means mined nickel measured by its metal content, unless a refined or intermediate product is named. In 2025 Indonesia mined 2.6 million tonnes, 67% of the world's 3.9 million tonnes (USGS MCS). Philippines was second at 6.9% and Russia third at 5.1%, followed by New Caledonia and Canada. Countries outside the 9 the survey lists separately accounted for 7.8%, and world mine output changed +5% from the previous year. No other large industrial metal is so concentrated in a single country.

Sulphide deposits are the older half of the industry. Where magma carrying dissolved sulfur cooled inside ancient crust, nickel, copper and platinum-group metals separated out as sulfide minerals in discrete, high-grade bodies. That is the Sudbury basin in Canada, formed in the shock of a meteorite impact, the Norilsk-Talnakh deposits in Siberia, the Kambalda belt in Western Australia, Thompson in Manitoba and Voisey's Bay in Labrador. Sulphide ore can be concentrated by flotation and smelted much like copper, and it yields the pure metal that the London Metal Exchange accepts.

Laterites are younger and shallower. In the wet tropics, rain leaches magnesium and silica out of ultramafic bedrock over millions of years and leaves an iron-rich blanket enriched in nickel, tens of meters thick and reachable with an excavator. Indonesia, the Philippines, New Caledonia, Cuba and Brazil sit on those blankets. Laterites hold most of the world's land-based nickel but supplied a minority of it for a century, because separating nickel from iron and magnesium needs either a furnace hot enough to melt the whole rock or an autoclave that dissolves it under pressure. The industry's center of gravity moved once both routes were built at scale in Indonesia.

Reserves, which the USGS defines as the part of identified resources that could be extracted economically at the time of the estimate, stood at 130.1 million tonnes in 2025. Indonesia held 48% of that total, ahead of Australia at 19% and Brazil at 12% (USGS MCS). Reserves are a snapshot of what is worth mining at the time, not a count of what exists, and laterite resources in particular expand whenever a processing route becomes cheaper.

Nickel crosses borders in three forms and each tells a different story. Ores and concentrates (HS 2604) are the raw material; in 2024 Philippines was the largest exporter with 36% of a trade worth $5 billion, and China took 57% of imports. Mattes and intermediates (HS 7501), the half-finished products of laterite processing, are a much larger trade at $13.7 billion: Indonesia shipped 55% of them and China bought 54%. Finished unwrought nickel (HS 7502) is the primary table on this page. In 2024 Norway was the largest exporter of unwrought nickel (HS 7502) with 15% of the world's $14.3 billion, ahead of Canada and Australia, while China was the largest importer at 13%.

Read together, the three lines show a chain that has been rebuilt in one decade. The country that mines the most nickel barely appears in the finished-metal table but dominates the intermediates table, because it banned ore exports and built furnaces instead. The countries at the top of the unwrought table are refiners: Norway, Canada and Australia run refineries that turn matte and concentrate, some of it imported, into cathode, briquettes and powder. The trade also splits by quality. Class 1 nickel contains at least 99.80% nickel and can be dissolved into battery chemicals or delivered against an exchange contract. Class 2 nickel is ferronickel and nickel pig iron, an iron-nickel alloy of much lower nickel content that goes straight into a stainless steel furnace and never trades on an exchange. A tonne of contained nickel in each form is not interchangeable, which is why a shortage can exist in one class while the other is in surplus.

The reference price is the London Metal Exchange nickel contract, ticker NI, which trades in 6 t lots quoted in US$/t and settles by delivery of class 1 nickel, meaning cathode, briquettes, pellets or rounds of at least 99.80% nickel, into an LME-approved warehouse. As with the other LME metals there is a cash price for delivery in two days and a three-month price, and the spread between them shows whether nearby metal is scarce or plentiful. The Shanghai Futures Exchange lists a yuan-denominated nickel contract for the Chinese domestic market, and the Wuxi and Shanghai spot markets quote the physical premiums that Chinese buyers actually pay.

The series charted here is LME cash. In August 2026 it averaged $16,751/t, up 12% from a year earlier (World Bank Pink Sheet). The highest monthly average in the series was $52,179/t in May 2007; adjusted for US inflation the real high was $79,168/t in May 2007, and the lowest monthly average since the series began in 1960 was $1,631/t in January 1960. Monthly averages smooth away the most violent episode in the contract's history: in March 2022 the intraday price briefly passed six figures per tonne before the exchange suspended trading and cancelled a day of deals, an intervention that was later challenged in court and that pushed some producers and consumers into pricing off assessed indices instead.

Almost nobody pays the exchange price directly. Miners selling sulfide concentrate receive the LME value of the contained nickel minus treatment and refining charges, the fee that smelters and refiners negotiate for turning concentrate into metal, with deductions for the iron and magnesium that come with it and credits for copper, cobalt and precious metals. Laterite products are quoted as a payable percentage of the LME price: mixed hydroxide precipitate and matte trade at a discount that widens when refining capacity is tight, while ferronickel and nickel pig iron are priced against Chinese stainless steel economics rather than against class 1 metal, and can trade far below the exchange. Battery-grade nickel sulfate carries a premium over class 1 metal that reflects the cost of dissolving and purifying it.

One government sets the supply curve for this metal. Rules on ore exports, on annual production quotas granted to each mine, on royalty rates and on which processing routes qualify for tax holidays decide how fast the largest producer grows. Because the country's capacity was built quickly and largely on borrowed capital, policy that slows permit approvals or raises costs feeds through to world supply within a quarter or two, and the market now reads Indonesian ministerial decrees the way it once read Canadian strike ballots.

Stainless steel is the largest use of nickel by a wide margin, so the metal is mostly a bet on construction, appliances, kitchen equipment and process plant in China, Indonesia, India and Europe. Stainless mills can also swap between nickel-bearing austenitic grades and cheaper 200-series or ferritic grades that use manganese or no nickel at all, so a sustained rally destroys some demand permanently. Mill margins and stainless inventories in Wuxi and Foshan are watched as leading indicators of nickel buying.

Nickel-rich cathodes store more energy per kilogram than the alternatives, so every shift in battery chemistry moves nickel demand. Growth in nickel-manganese-cobalt and nickel-cobalt-aluminum cells raises it; the spread of lithium iron phosphate cells, which contain no nickel, lowers it. Battery makers buy nickel sulfate rather than metal, and sulfate is made from class 1 metal, from mixed hydroxide precipitate or from converted matte, so the price signal reaches the mine through a chain of intermediate products.

The two halves of the market were long separate: class 2 fed stainless steel, class 1 fed everything else. Building furnaces that convert nickel pig iron into matte, and then into sulfate, joined them. When that conversion is profitable, surplus class 2 can be pushed into the battery chain and the premium for class 1 collapses; when it is not, the two prices drift apart again. The conversion cost, which is mostly energy, therefore acts as a valve between a surplus market and a tight one.

Laterite processing is energy-hungry. Rotary kiln electric furnaces run on captive coal-fired power, and high pressure acid leach plants consume sulfur, limestone and steam. Coal and sulfur prices, and the capital cost of autoclaves that must resist hot acid, set the floor under laterite supply. Sulphide mines have a different cost structure, dominated by deep underground mining and by the credits they earn from copper and platinum-group metals, so the two halves of the industry respond to different shocks.

Russia is one of the few sources of high-purity class 1 nickel outside the laterite belt, and its refineries also supply palladium and copper. Sanctions, self-sanctioning by banks and shippers, and exchange rules on which brands may be delivered into warehouses change where that metal can go rather than how much exists. The effect shows up as regional premiums and as shifts in warehouse stocks, and it raises the share of exchange inventory made up of brands some buyers will not take.

Nickel is a small contract relative to the value of the metal it prices, and its warehouse stocks are a thin cushion. A large short position that cannot find deliverable class 1 metal can therefore move the price violently, as it did in March 2022 when trading was suspended and a day of transactions was cancelled. The episode cut open interest and pushed hedgers toward over-the-counter deals and assessed indices, so the exchange price now sits on a narrower base of trading than the size of the physical market implies.

The sulfide route follows the copper playbook. Ore is mined underground or in open pits, crushed and ground, and separated by froth flotation into a nickel concentrate holding roughly a tenth to a fifth nickel, with copper and cobalt concentrates taken off alongside. The concentrate is roasted and smelted in a flash or electric furnace to a matte of nickel and copper sulfides, and the matte is then refined. Three refining routes are used: electrowinning from a sulfate or chloride solution to make cathode, ammonia pressure leaching to make briquettes and powder, and the carbonyl process, in which nickel reacts with carbon monoxide to form a gas that is decomposed back to very pure metal pellets. All three yield class 1 nickel.

The laterite route splits by depth. The lower, magnesium-rich saprolite layer carries more nickel and is smelted whole: dried, calcined in a rotary kiln and melted in an electric furnace, a combination known as RKEF, which produces ferronickel or, with cheaper feed and less refining, nickel pig iron. Both are iron-nickel alloys charged straight into stainless steel furnaces. The upper, iron-rich limonite layer holds too little nickel to smelt economically, so it is dissolved instead: high pressure acid leaching mixes the ore with sulfuric acid in an autoclave at high temperature and pressure, and the dissolved nickel and cobalt are precipitated as mixed hydroxide precipitate, an intermediate that refineries turn into sulfate or metal.

Two newer steps connect the halves. Nickel pig iron can be blown with sulfur in a converter to make a high-grade matte, which is then leached and crystallized into battery-grade nickel sulfate; mixed hydroxide precipitate can be dissolved and purified to the same product. Both routes let laterite ore, which cannot make class 1 metal directly, reach the battery market. Recycling runs on a separate track: stainless steel scrap returns nickel to the melt shop without any refining at all, and it supplies a large share of stainless raw material, while spent lithium-ion batteries are only beginning to return nickel through hydrometallurgical recovery.

Stainless steel dominates. The International Nickel Study Group reports that stainless and alloy steel take by far the largest share of first-use nickel, with the balance divided between non-ferrous alloys, electroplating, foundry products and batteries (INSG, world nickel statistics). Nickel is what makes stainless steel austenitic: it stabilizes a crystal structure that stays tough at low temperature, resists corrosion and does not hold a magnet, which is why 304 and 316 grades are used for tanks, pipework, cutlery, sinks, chemical plant and architectural cladding. Nickel superalloys, which keep their strength when red hot, are the reason jet engines and gas turbines exist in their present form.

The battery share is the fastest-growing part of demand and the reason nickel is on critical-minerals lists. Nickel-rich cathodes raise the energy density of lithium-ion cells, so a longer-range electric vehicle generally carries more nickel; a competing chemistry, lithium iron phosphate, uses none. Beyond those two markets, nickel plating protects steel from rust, nickel-copper and nickel-chromium alloys serve marine and heating applications, and nickel catalysts hydrogenate vegetable oils. Coinage, once a defining use, is now a rounding error.

Processing has concentrated faster than mining. Indonesian industrial parks at Morowali and Weda Bay, built largely with Chinese capital and equipment, contain smelters, power stations, ports and worker housing on single sites, so ore travels a few kilometers rather than a few thousand. That is why the country's exports have shifted from ore to matte and hydroxide: in 2024 it supplied 55% of world exports of nickel mattes and intermediates (CEPII BACI), while Philippines became the main seller of unprocessed ore, most of it to China.

Class 1 refining stayed where it always was. Norway's Kristiansand refinery, Canada's Sudbury and Fort Saskatchewan plants, the Clydach carbonyl works in Wales, Norilsk's Kola operations, Japanese refineries at Niihama and Chinese plants in Gansu process matte and concentrate into cathode, briquettes and powder. That is the reason Norway tops the unwrought nickel export table with 15% of world export value in 2024 despite mining almost none of it (CEPII BACI). Ore moves by bulk carrier from the Philippines and New Caledonia to Chinese and Japanese furnaces; matte and hydroxide move in containers from Sulawesi and Halmahera to refineries in China, South Korea and Japan.

The chokepoints are policy and power rather than geography. A single government's decisions on export rules and production quotas govern most of world supply. Captive coal-fired generation ties laterite processing to coal prices and to emissions rules that may tighten. High pressure acid leach plants are technically demanding and have a long record of delays and cost overruns, so new capacity arrives late more often than early. Tailings and slag disposal in high-rainfall, seismically active islands is a permanent environmental and permitting risk, and rules on deep-sea tailings placement have already forced design changes. On the exchange side, deliverable class 1 stocks are small enough that a single large position can dictate the price for weeks.