Divestment Completed, BKPM Says Vale Still Has 4 'Houseworks'

JAKARTA - Special Staff for the Improvement of National Entrepreneurs at the Ministry of Investment/BKPM Pradana Indraputra said, after the 14 percent divestment process of PT Vale Indonesia's (INCO) shares to MIND ID ended, it was known that Vale still had 4 'homeworks' that still had to be continued in the future.

"First of course downstream. As the government puts it, whatever the commodities are, we don't want to stop upstream, everything must be lost," he said in the Mining Zone quoted Monday, March 4.

He said, in the context of nickel commodities, there are two processing methods, including High Pressure Acid Leaching (HPAL) and Rotary Kiln Electric Furnace (RKEF).

For HPAL, he said, the government plans to carry out further downstreaming by not only stopping at the precursor stage but moving up to cathode.

"This is still in our discussion stage because until today the plan is still up to precursors, the multipliers have been many times," he said.

For this, according to him, the government is not only cooperating with Vale but also Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt Co. Ltd (Huayou), Ford and Volkswagen.

Pradana melanjutkan, PR kedua yang masih harus dikerjakan Vale adalah mempertahankan good mining practicesnya yang selama ini telah berjalan dengan baik. Vale diketahui menjadi salah satu perusahaan tambangan dengan emisi karbon terendah dalam fasilitas RKEF.

"That's good. Don't let it fall behind. If possible, the facilities built will be even better," he added.

Praana said Vale would shift energy by utilizing bioenergy which was considered to produce less emissions, electrification of equipment, and even replacing buses with combustion engines into electric cars in its operations.

Furthermore, the third homework is the company's performance in the involvement of local economic business actors in the local area.

"This is our regulation. So we know that when we talk about ESG, the environment is good but when we talk about socio-economics, since Bahlil served (as Minister of Investment) we issued Ministerial Regulation number 1 of 2022 which requires investors to partner with local entrepreneurs," he explained.

For this reason, Pradana continued, the government targets economic cakes to be divided equally with local business actors and there must be new rich people in the blood around the mining area of PT Vale Indonesia.

Finally, Pradana hopes that the use and development of technology in Vale's mining and downstreaming must involve young Indonesians.

"Some study abroad, there is a top graduate in each university involved in the context of technology innovation. We hope that Vale can become a beacon of economy and the construction of new human resources and natural resources," he concluded.