Tearing apart Indonesia's nickel ore quota

Nickel.

The sell-side still calls it a surplus market. UBS put out a note in July 2025 saying nickel remains in surplus through 2026. S&P Global's model shows 179,000 tonnes of excess metal sloshing around. CNBC ran a segment on weak battery demand and LFP adoption eating into nickel's EV story. The consensus is clear: too much nickel, not enough reasons to care.

They're reading the 2024 playbook. The 2026 machine looks nothing like that.

What flipped? Not demand. Demand has actually disappointed on the battery side — LFP chemistry keeps gaining share, plug-in hybrids are outselling full BEVs in several markets, and the nickel-intensive cathode story is quieter than the bulls promised. Stainless steel is still doing the heavy lifting, same as always. More than 60% of nickel consumption. The EV revolution didn't change that math as fast as the pitch decks said it would.

No. What flipped was the supply valve. And it's sitting in Jakarta.

Indonesia's Energy Ministry sets a nickel ore mining quota every year — the RKAB. Think of it as a production permit for the entire archipelago. In 2025, that quota was 379 million wet metric tonnes. Comfortable margin. Market stayed loose.

For 2026, Jakarta set it at 260 to 270 million tonnes. A roughly 29 to 31% cut. Smelters need roughly 345 million this year. That puts the quota below demand by 75 to 85 million tonnes.

The consequences are already visible on the ground. Eramet's Weda Bay Nickel — one of Indonesia's largest laterite operations — had its permit slashed from 42 million wmt to 12 million. A 71% cut. They halted ore production entirely when the quota ran out. Didn't taper. Stopped.

Then there's Gunbuster Nickel, a $3 billion China-backed smelter complex. Shut two of three furnaces. Laid off 1,900 workers. Entered PKPU — Indonesia's version of court-supervised debt restructuring — on June 19. Its parent, Jiangsu Delong, is itself in financial distress. Nobody is coming to restart those furnaces soon.

Industry-wide, RKEF smelter capacity utilization has dropped from 84% to 76%. That's not a seasonal dip. That's ore starvation. And the new HPM pricing formula — effective April 15 — raised the base price for all ore grades and now includes cobalt, iron, and chromium in the valuation for the first time. Higher ore costs on less ore. The math is moving in one direction.

Meanwhile, on the HPAL side — the plants making battery-grade intermediates — Macquarie's Jim Lennon estimates that the sulfur price spike from the Hormuz disruption has added roughly $10,000 per tonne to nickel production costs. Indonesia imported 30% less sulfur in H1 2026 than the year before. You can't run acid leach operations without acid.

Three consecutive years of surplus — 175,000 tonnes in 2023, 116,000 in 2024, 283,000 in 2025 — trained the entire market to think "nickel glut" on autopilot. The INSG just told them the glut is over. Most of the sell-side hasn't updated the slide deck.

Here's what the LME headline number hides. The nickel market isn't one market. It's two — and they're splitting apart.

Class 2 nickel — nickel pig iron, ferronickel, the stuff that goes into stainless steel — is what Indonesia mass-produces. It's what created the "glut." Every surplus number you've read in the last three years is dominated by NPI tonnes pouring out of Sulawesi and Maluku. That's the nickel the bears are counting.

Class 1 nickel — refined metal, battery-grade sulfate, the stuff cathode manufacturers actually need — is a different animal entirely. Supply growth is lagging demand growth. And the ex-Indonesia pipeline for Class 1? It's not growing. It's contracting.

BHP put Nickel West — its entire Western Australian nickel operation, the largest Class 1 producer in the Southern Hemisphere — into temporary suspension when prices collapsed under Indonesian oversupply. I was bearish nickel in that window. Most people were. The surplus looked permanent. It wasn't.

Now Indonesia is cutting the ore that feeds its own NPI furnaces and HPAL plants, while the saprolite grades that remain are declining double digits year-over-year. The cheap supply that killed western mine economics is itself getting more expensive. NPI production costs have been pushed to roughly $15,740 per tonne. LME nickel sits at $16,800. That's a margin you could lose in a bad week.

The entire sell-side models nickel as one commodity with one price. The physical market is pricing it as two commodities with a widening gap between them. Refined Class 1 holds firm. NPI sags. And the analysts averaging the two together are producing a number that describes neither reality.

Goldman Sachs has raised its 2026 nickel price forecast twice this year — from $14,800 to $17,200, then again to $18,500 — citing tighter Indonesian supply and sulfur shortages. They're chasing the tape. But they're also chasing a physical reality the "nickel glut" models refuse to acknowledge: when the country that produces 60% of global supply decides to produce less, the surplus doesn't narrow. It inverts.

The sequence from here is straightforward. It's the same sequence every time a single-country supply dominance gets stress-tested. The only variable is speed.

Jakarta has political reasons to keep the quotas tight. The RKAB system isn't just about supply management — it's about forcing downstream value-add inside Indonesia, about resource nationalism, about a government that watched its laterite get shipped out as raw ore for two decades and decided that was over. The industry lobby group FINI is pushing hard for higher quotas. There will be pressure. There always is. But the trend line is clear: annual permits replacing three-year cycles, stricter enforcement, higher administered prices.

There's a caveat I need to say plainly. Indonesia could reverse course. They've done it before — announced tough quotas, watched the industry scream, then quietly loosened them in the second half. If the RKAB gets revised upward, the deficit narrative collapses and nickel retests $15,000. That's a real risk and anyone who tells you it isn't is selling you something.

But if the quotas hold — and the ore grade decline and sulfur shortage suggest they might hold tighter than the market expects — the capital rotation points somewhere specific. Not the Indonesian NPI smelters. Not the broad-based mining ETFs that average Class 1 and Class 2 exposure into a single meaningless number.

The edge is in ex-Indonesia Class 1 sulfide producers. Companies like Canada Nickel, developing Crawford — the second-largest nickel sulfide reserve globally — in northern Ontario, with front-end engineering underway and a carbon-negative production target. Or the optionality sitting inside BHP's suspended Nickel West, which becomes economic again somewhere north of $18,000 and turns into a call option on a restart announcement. These are the assets that got crushed by the Indonesian NPI flood. They're the same assets that reprice fastest when the flood recedes.

The sell-side says surplus. The INSG says deficit. Indonesia says less ore. Goldman has revised upward twice and is still behind the physical market. One side of this trade is wrong, and the physical layer is telling you which side. It's telling you loudly. Whether you listen is a different question.