Tesla May Buy Low-Carbon Nickel From Canada’s Giga Metals, Reuters Reports

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It’s been reported in the past few days that Canadian miner Giga Metals may supply Tesla with low-carbon nickel, and that Tesla could even help with the development of a mine in some way (which could simply mean helping to finance the project).

“Giga Metals’s low carbon nickel plans include turning waste from its mining operations into cement type rock using carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and using hydropower,” Reuters reports. “Tesla is in discussions with Canadian miner Giga Metals about helping to develop a large mine that would give the electric carmaker access to low carbon nickel for its batteries.”

Giga Metals President Martin Vydra had nothing to say about the speculation, but did note that has long been engaged with automakers about supplying them or their battery producers with nickel. “Giga is actively engaged, and has been for some time, with automakers regarding our ability to produce carbon neutral nickel.”

We don’t have any intel beyond that on Tesla potentially buying nickel from Giga Metals, but we have been digging into the broader nickel topic for weeks, triggered especially by Elon Musk’s request for more nickel mining on the last Tesla quarterly conference call. “Wherever you are in the world, please mine more nickel and … go for efficiency, obviously environmentally-friendly nickel mining at high volume. Tesla will give you a giant contract for a long period of time, if you mine nickel efficiently and in an environmentally sensitive way,” Musk said on that call. I discussed this matter with RK Equity’s Rodney Hooper and Howard Klein in recent CleanTech Talk podcasts. You can listen to those or read summaries of them here:

• Lithium & Nickel & Tesla, Oh My!
• The Battery & Mining Catch-22 Threatening The EV Revolution