How nickel is made
The purest nickel is made by turning it into a gas with carbon monoxide and then letting it plate itself onto pellets.
- stations
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- things upstream
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- raw sources
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- steps from the ground
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The short version
Nickel comes from sulfide or laterite ores. Sulfide ore is crushed, floated and smelted to a matte, which is refined by leaching and plating out nickel electrically, or by the Mond process. In that process nickel is turned into a gas with carbon monoxide and then decomposed to give metal over 99.99 percent pure.
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Crush the nickel ore
Nickel ores are either oxides, such as laterite, or sulfides, mainly pentlandite. About 60 percent of known resources are in laterites and 40 percent in sulfide deposits. Sulfide rock is crushed and ground.
Goes in -
Float the sulfides
Most sulfide deposits are first concentrated by froth flotation, which lifts the nickel minerals away from waste rock.
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Smelt it to a matte
Furnaces roast and smelt the concentrate into a nickel matte. A conventional route like this produces metal that is at least 75 percent nickel, good enough for many stainless steel uses without further refining.
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Leach and plate it
In one refining route the matte is leached into a nickel salt solution, and the nickel is electroplated from solution onto cathodes as electrolytic nickel.
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Turn it to a gas and back
In the Mond process, nickel is treated with carbon monoxide and forms nickel carbonyl gas. Heating the gas makes it fall apart, depositing pure nickel onto pellets that are constantly stirred.
over 99.99% pure
Worth repeating
- About 68 percent of the nickel produced goes into stainless steel.
- The five-cent coins that Canada struck from 1922 to 1981 were 99.9 percent nickel, so they were magnetic.
- Nickel carbonyl, which makes the Mond process work, is a volatile and highly toxic liquid at room temperature.
Back to the ground
Follow every input upstream and nickel starts as these 4 raw sources.
Everything it is made of See it on the map
Open the whole family tree
Where it comes from
- Indonesia2,600,000 tonnes mined
- Philippines270,000 tonnes mined
- Russia200,000 tonnes mined
- Canada140,000 tonnes mined
- New Caledonia140,000 tonnes mined
2025, nickel mined, out of about 3.9 million tonnes worldwide.
Where it goes next
Nickel feeds 23 lines directly and reaches 58 things in total.
Further down the line
Keep walking
Sources
Cite this page: "How nickel is made." Assembly Line, 2026-11-03. https://assemblyline.org/make/nickel