How nickel ore is mined
Nickel mining splits in two: earth-moving through soft tropical laterite, or tunneling after hard sulfide rock.
- stations
- 5
- things downstream
- 60
The short version
Nickel ore comes in two kinds, and each gets its own mine. Laterite is soft, claylike and near the surface, so shovels and draglines load it into trucks like dirt. Sulfide ore is hard rock mined mostly underground, then ground and floated into a concentrate of 10 to 20% nickel. Either way, ore is generally worth mining above about 1.3% nickel.
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Scrape the laterite
Long weathering of peridotite leaves nickel concentrated in soft strata near the surface. Big shovels, draglines or front-end loaders dig those layers, throw aside boulders and waste, and load trucks at the face.
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Screen the soft ore
Laterite is crushed and screened, and wet plants add hydrocyclones, stripping out waste until the nickel content has typically doubled. The richer feed then goes to a smelter.
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Tunnel the sulfide rock
Sulfide deposits are usually mined underground in much the same way as copper, though some began as open pits. The ore mixes pentlandite, the main nickel mineral, with pyrrhotite and copper minerals.
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Crush and ball-mill
One common route starts with a gyratory crusher and then a ball mill fed wet, which frees the sulfide grains from the rock.
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Float the pentlandite
Air bubbles carry water-repelling pentlandite to the surface. A flotation stage splits the feed into nickel concentrate at 10 to 20% nickel, a separate copper concentrate, and barren waste under 0.3% nickel.
10 to 20% nickel
Worth repeating
- Land-based nickel resources averaging 1% nickel or more are about 60% in laterites and 40% in sulfide deposits.
- Canada struck its five-cent coins from 99.9% nickel from 1922 to 1981, which is why those coins stick to a magnet.
- Ore bound for the smelter at Le Nickel in New Caledonia held 9% nickel in 1900 and holds only 1 to 3% today.
Where it comes from
- Indonesia2,600,000 t
- Philippines270,000 t
- Russia200,000 t
- Canada140,000 t
- New Caledonia140,000 t
Nickel mined in 2025 (estimate), out of about 3.9 million tonnes worldwide.
Where it goes next
Nickel ore feeds 2 lines directly and reaches 60 things in total.
Further down the line
Keep walking
Sources
Cite this page: "How nickel ore is mined." Assembly Line, 2026-11-03. https://assemblyline.org/make/nickel-ore