Russian mining giant Norilsk Nickel plans to produce the first batch of carbon neutral nickel this year and is expanding its participation in blockchain platforms, company officials said.
Over the past two years, Norilsk Nickel has reduced its carbon footprint by more than 70,000 tonnes and plans to produce the first batch of carbon-neutral nickel in the near future, Interros head Sergey Batekhin told reporters.
Interros, Norilsk Nickel’s largest shareholder.
The “green” status of these products of the company will not be ensured by offsets, but through a certain set of measures that made it possible to offset the carbon footprint of this batch. In early June, the company’s board of directors approved a new environmental strategy aimed at further reducing emissions and improving energy efficiency. At present, Norilsk Nickel is in the lower segment of the global indicators of the intensity of greenhouse gas emissions and is the leader in the use of renewable energy sources: in 2020, the share of electricity obtained from renewable sources amounted to 46% for the group as a whole. According to Batekhin, the carbon neutral metal will be in demand by the world’s most demanding manufacturers such as Tesla, Apple and others, especially in anticipation of the carbon tax that the EU plans to introduce from 2023.
This is also facilitated by additional projects that could be operational by 2025, further reducing the carbon footprint. For example, the transition of a part of mining equipment to NGV fuel.
Norilsk Nickel is preparing to build an LNG plant. The project is expected to be completed within 3-4 years. The commissioning of the plant will be synchronized with the peak of the use of large equipment in mining pits in 2024-25.
Interros also entered the consortium of investors for the Atomyze blockchain platform, Batekhin said.
Atomyze deals with the tokenization of physical assets, that is, the translation of them into digital form. One of the first issuers of Atomyze was Norilsk Nickel, which last year issued tokens for its metals on this platform. Tokens are actively traded on the London and Frankfurt stock exchanges; they are planned to be placed on other world platforms. “Own platforms for tokenization are an element of a full-fledged infrastructure of the digital economy, which is important from the point of view of ensuring digital equality of Russia with the world’s largest economies,” Batekhin said. The Atomyze platform exists in American and Swiss jurisdictions pending permission from the Central Bank of Russia. At the end of May, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs asked the Central Bank to speed up the licensing of tokenization platforms in Russia.
Earlier, Norilsk Nickel, the world’s largest producer of palladium and nickel, has issued the first tokens involving metal contracts to its major industrial partners Traxys SA and Umicore SA.
Norilsk Nickel was one of the first in the industry and in the world to launch this mechanism.
Atomyze uses Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to tokenize assets in digital form providing accessibility, reducing costs, and increasing transparency. GPF, the platform’s first client, is issuing tokens covering the whole range of metals produced by Nornickel — via the Atomyze tokenization platform operated by Tokentrust AG.