As the world works to fight climate change, cutting carbon emissions from heavy industry is just as important as cleaning up transportation.
Nickel, a metal essential for making electric car batteries and stainless steel, is at the center of this shift.
But there’s a catch—producing nickel the traditional way is very polluting. Making one ton of nickel releases about 20 tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂), which could cancel out many of the climate benefits of electric vehicles.
Now, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials (MPI-SusMat) in Germany have come up with a new, carbon-free method for extracting nickel that could transform the way we produce this critical material.
Their process, recently published in the journal Nature, avoids the high emissions of traditional methods and could make nickel production cleaner, cheaper, and more efficient.
Currently, the world mostly uses high-grade nickel ores that are easier to process, while lower-grade ores—making up about 60% of global reserves—are often ignored because they’re more chemically complex and expensive to refine.
Traditional nickel production requires several energy-heavy steps, such as calcination, smelting, and chemical reduction. These steps are not only polluting but also costly and time-consuming.
The Max Planck team has developed a new method that uses hydrogen plasma instead of carbon-based fuels. Hydrogen plasma is a super-hot, electrically charged form of hydrogen gas.
When used in an electric furnace, it breaks down the complex mineral structures of low-grade ores and extracts nickel in a single step.
This process takes place in just one furnace, where smelting, refining, and reduction all happen at once—producing a ferronickel alloy ready for use.
This new approach cuts CO₂ emissions by 84% and is up to 18% more energy-efficient, especially when powered by green hydrogen and renewable electricity. The resulting ferronickel alloy can be used directly in stainless steel production or further refined for use in electric vehicle batteries.
The team is now working on scaling up the process for industrial use. One of the challenges is making sure that the chemical reactions happen consistently throughout the furnace. To solve this, the researchers suggest using industrial tools like short high-current arcs, magnetic stirring devices, or gas injection—proven methods already used in metal processing.
As an added bonus, the leftover slag from this process can be reused in construction materials like bricks and cement, and the same technique could also be applied to extract cobalt, another important metal for electric vehicle batteries and energy storage.
This breakthrough could help pave the way for cleaner, more sustainable electrification across industries.
Source: Max Planck Society.
