South Korea has struck deals with Kazakhstan to allow its firms to explore for critical minerals in the Central Asian state, it said on Wednesday, as the home to major chip producers and leading carmaker Hyundai moves to diversify its supply chains.

New Caledonia’s nickel processing industry remains at a virtual standstill after weeks of unrest in the southern Pacific territory, with Eramet-owned SLN keeping its smelter at minimum capacity and Prony Resources halting its plant.

China’s Tsingshan, the world’s biggest nickel producer, is planning to register 50,000 metric tons capacity of nickel cathode on the London Metal Exchange (LME) in the second half of 2024, a company official said on Wednesday.

Nornickel’s flagship enterprise is undergoing a large-scale reconstruction of its pyrometallurgical production, which will significantly improve the reliability of the technological process.

The Indonesian government is conducting a comprehensive evaluation regarding the termination of permits for the RKEF smelters which make products in the form of ferronickel and nickel pig iron, a mining ministry official said on Tuesday.

To serve China's dual carbon goals, "greening the process" has become a crucial issue facing the high-quality development of the steel industry.

Last year, the region supplied 306 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity to outside the region, equivalent to the annual output of three Three Gorges Dam, she added.

It was not possible to obtain a reply from Cleveland-Cliffs to requests for comment by the time of publication.