Nickel mining in the Philippines is slowed by angry villagers

The small, crescent-shaped island of Sibuyan sits at the dead center of the Philippine archipelago. Venturing there from Manila is a 15-hour journey by bus and ferry, which keeps most vacationers away from its glistening sandbars and unspoiled old-growth forests. The water from all its 36 rivers and streams is drinkable, locals say; it has never been connected to any other landmass, preserving unique plant and animal life. Natural scientists have called it the “Galapagos of Asia.”

But Sibuyan’s isolation hasn’t kept everyone at bay. It’s also home to an estimated seven million metric tons of nickel reserves, locked in the ground below the verdant Mount Guiting-Guiting in San Fernando municipality. The ore was the basis of a clash that went viral this February, when a weekslong protest by a crowd of villagers exploded into conflict. At the base of the mountain, villagers spread tarpaulins and erected tents and bamboo huts, facing off against trucks belonging to Altai Philippines Mining Corporation.

In a video that blazed through social media and nightly news, 63-year-old Fernando Uy Marin, wearing a white T-shirt and flip-flops, threw himself in front of a truck, hanging on for dear life. He fell and grabbed onto another truck, but was quickly pulled off by five police officers as the giant vehicles rumbled past.

“I just wanted to hold on,” the soft-spoken Marin told Rest of World in March, outside the Sibuyan guesthouse he manages. “To show the world that we need some help out here, just to protect our island. That’s the only thing I had in mind.”

In the Philippines, rich landscapes like that of Sibuyan are threatened by the frenzied global rush for nickel, used for electric car batteries, solar panels and other key components driving the transition to clean energy. Local resistance is mounting, even as the mining-friendly Marcos government readies lucrative new extractive taxes and expects to approve more mining sites.

The Philippines is touted as one of the most mineral-rich countries in the world, with only 5% of those reserves explored and 3% covered by mining contracts. The country’s nickel production levels are second only to those of Indonesia.

When Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was elected president of the Philippines in May 2022, he publicly promised to conserve the environment. At the Davos summit in January this year, however, his finance secretary also pledged to tap the country’s mineral resources to feed the administration’s signature sovereign wealth fund.

Altai Philippines is backed by Kenneth Gatchalian, a Philippine senator’s brother. It stands to benefit from the new era. On Sibuyan, Altai Philippines was exploring nickel deposits with a permit to send the ore to Swiss mineral sourcing giant Transamine in Hong Kong, a well-known name in battery materials.

Transamine Far East Limited’s director, Thomas Adamian, told Rest of World the company was “hoping to buy nickel ore from Altai and send it to China,” but mutually agreed to cancel its purchase agreement “following the eruption of social unrest.” He declined to name the identity of the Chinese buyer and did not respond to follow-up enquiries. Altai Philippines did not respond to Rest of World’s requests for comment.

On the nearby island of Palawan at the Rio Tuba mine, EV-bound nickel operations are expanding. The material is being sent to factories making batteries for electric vehicles manufactured by Tesla and Toyota, according to a 2021 joint investigation by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network, and NBC News.

Rio Tuba has been touted by its operator, the mining giant Nickel Asia, as an example of responsible mining. But the investigation found high levels of hexavalent chromium in a river and creek near the mining site, which residents once used for drinking water. Now, the company is planning to mine two new areas in the foothills of nearby Mount Bulanjao, creating a pair of scars that will stretch across much of the narrow island. Locals are incensed.

Jeminda Bartolome, 58, a local leader, met Rest of World just outside one of the areas earmarked for mining, in a spartanly decorated thatched-wood home with overhead lights, a dusty old radio, and a refrigerator. The average Filipino consumer uses about 800 kilowatt hours of electricity per year, according to WorldData — about one-fourteenth the consumption of a U.S. consumer and one-fifth what an American driver uses to charge an electric car.

Bartolome said she’d give up her motorcycle and her cell phone if it stopped nickel mining. “I’m throwing mine away [after this interview],” she said, jokingly. “Our ancestors lived without cell phones. We can live without them now.”

Bartolome said she didn’t know that Rio Tuba’s nickel was going into electric cars being sold in the U.S. until she was interviewed by reporters in 2021. Now, she’s acutely aware that rural and Indigenous groups worldwide can easily be cast as blocking the way of progress and impeding the clean energy transition. She knows that in office towers and think tanks on the other side of the world, people argue that preserving Indigenous medicinal traditions and faraway springs is a luxury that the warming world cannot afford.

With her was Kennedy Corio, 50, a leader of the Palawan Indigenous group, living in the same municipality of Bataraza. He observed that losing the mountain and its watershed amounts to losing his livelihood. He uses native plants as healing remedies when members of his community fall ill: tree roots for high blood pressure, water from vines for bone aches and urinary tract infections.

“There’s a big difference between the poor and the rich,” Corio said. “The rich … can move to other places. But our lives are dependent on the mountain. For poor people like us, if you remove the mountain, it means we will also vanish.”

But resistance has been infectious, too. In April, at a new mine in Brooke’s Point, about 60 kilometers north of Rio Tuba, protesting villagers imitated the Sibuyan blockade by cutting off an access road for nickel-laden mining trucks belonging to Ipilan Nickel Corporation. Again, as in Sibuyan, police and private security burst through the barrier.

Brooke’s Point vice mayor, Mary Jean Feliciano, grew up in the area. As a child, she would walk for miles through the mountains with her father to visit her grandfather, who built his home in an old-growth forest alongside a natural spring. “There was a place where you could drink water flowing from a bamboo forest,” Feliciano said. Now, she added, it runs brown.

“It’s very ironic that, in order to mitigate the impact of global warming, you have to cut down our trees. Is that a good solution?” she said. “So many trees will be cut, millions, just to support the initiatives of Elon Musk to provide [electric] vehicles and stop the rise of global warming.”

Some villagers, however, feel forced to move with the political wind. Narlito Silnay, a tribal leader at Rio Tuba who was a vociferous anti-mining campaigner, controversially signed an agreement in March to cede Indigenous land for mining in return for promises to fund schools and medical infrastructure.

“If the government could give those [benefits], we would not allow mining,” Silnay told Rest of World. “If you have 10 hectares of land, you have to sacrifice one to save nine.”

The tides could shift towards mining at Sibuyan, too. The current mayor and vice mayor of San Fernando have gone against most of the island by cautiously supporting the mining exploration.

Last December, the Philippine Mines and Geosciences Bureau issued an export permit to Altai Philippines for a shipment of 50,000 wet metric tons of nickel ore, valued at $1.85 million. The permit, viewed by Rest of World, expired on January 28, 2023 — days before the police broke the barricade to allow the miner to keep operating.

Sibuyan’s protesting townspeople have had momentary vindication. After Altai Philippines broke their barricade, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources confirmed that the company did not have a current permit and ordered it to suspend its explorations.

But as of late August, mining trucks and backhoes still lurk across from the barricade. Hundreds of volunteers have taken turns standing guard since February, including students who have asked professors to schedule classes around their shifts.

After the February protests, Marin was personally sued for defamation by Altai Philippines for damaging the company’s profits, he said. Marin, however, is there for the long haul: He was born in Sibuyan and intends to die there. In recent years, his wife has begged him to travel around Asia, or at least around the Philippines. “She got upset with me,” he said. “I told her, I’d rather stay in Sibuyan.”