Indonesia, Britain sign collaboration agreement on critical minerals

JAKARTA : Britain on Wednesday signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on critical minerals with Indonesia, home to some of the world’s largest mineral resources, the UK’s embassy in Jakarta said.
The agreement will support policy dialogue, sharing of technical knowledge and expertise and cover areas like supply chain resilience, sustainable upstream and downstream processing, and mineral criticality, it said in a statement, which did not prove specific details.
The partnership “puts both countries as key players in the critical minerals supply chain,” Britain’s development minister Anneliese Dodds said in the statement after signing the deal with Indonesia’s energy minister.
Indonesia has rich deposits of tin, copper and bauxite, among others, and is the world’s largest source of nickel ore. It is seeking to extract more value from the mineral by attracting investment into its processing and in the manufacturing of electric vehicle batteries.
The announcement comes two months after the United States said it had approached Indonesia about joining a multinational critical mineral partnership aimed at accelerating development of sustainable critical minerals supply chains.
Indonesia has massively expanded its nickel processing sector since it banned exports of unprocessed ore in 2020, but environmentalists have blamed the industry for deforestation, and water and air pollution caused by smelters.
Earlier on Wednesday, Dodds told Reuters that Britain’s agreement with Indonesia was intended to create local jobs and protect the environment, including from damage created by mining, calling the partnership “incredibly important”.