Norilsk Nickel, which has time and again made its hometown one of the most polluted places on earth, has announced plans to slash dirty emissions – and finally has released a sketch of measures it will undertake to carry that out.
Norway would benefit too. An investment plan the industrial giant released in London late last month also presages a 50 percent cut in emissions wafting over Norway’s border from one of its smelting works in the Kola Peninsula industrial town of Nikel over the next several years.
That smelter is part of the Kola Mining and Metallurgy Company, a subsidiary of Norilsk Nickel, which has been a near-constant source of pollution and worries for northern Norway and other Scandinavian countries.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Oslo has struggled with Moscow over harrowing emissions of sulfur dioxide polluting both sides of the Arctic border, but it was not until the release of the Norilsk Nickel investment plan that the company has offered any concrete measures for curtailing them.
Vladimir Potanin, Norilsk Nickel’s billionaire CEO, told the audience in London that the new measures are aimed at making his historically polluting industry into an example of green environmental responsibility.
It isn’t the first time he has made such a promise. Almost exactly a year ago, Potanin emerged in public to say he planned to invest $14 billion for environmental upgrades over the next seven years.
Since then, his lieutenants have been repeating the same figure while offering little in the way of how specifically that money would be spent. But they have said the efforts were meant to dovetail with Russia’s Year of Ecology, which is rapidly drawing to an end with mixed results.
Still, Potanin’s decision is primarily market-driven, which rescues Norilsk Nickel’s declarations in London from being an empty promise. As the world’s largest nickel and palladium miner, Potanin has his eye on the electric car market and its dependence on lithium batteries, which contain nickel. Read more at https://bellona.org/news/industrial-pollution/2017-12-norilsk-nickel-offers-a-sketch-of-how-it-will-reduce-its-sulfur-dioxide-pollution