INTERVIEW: Terrafame urges Finland to stick to CRMA fast-track permit timelines

Terrafame, which mines around 70% of Europe's nickel, is calling on Finnish authorities to speed up the permit review for its expansion, the company's CEO Antti Koulumies told Platts in an interview.

The company's Kolmisoppi open-pit project in Finland gained strategic status under the EU Critical Raw Materials Act in March 2025, qualifying it for fast-tracked permitting capped at a binding maximum of 27 months.

By comparison, obtaining the previous main permit in Finland took nine years, according to Koulumies. He hopes the new pit will be permitted by 2029.

"The CRMA status should also give us priority in appeals, because in Finland, nothing in mining is done without two rounds of appeal, typically," he said. "If these timelines cannot be met, I really wonder what the CRMA is for."

Finland has a strong stake in making the CRMA work: five of its raw materials projects were designated strategic in the European Commission's latest selection in October 2026.

A nickel, cobalt and zinc producer, Terrafame evolved into an even more multimetal miner by mid-2024, when it started up a uranium recovery facility with a 250 mt/year production permit. It is now working to expand its portfolio further by developing capabilities to recover copper and the rare-earth element scandium.

As it makes an investment commitment to scale up its bio-heap leaching and metal recovery operations, Terrafame is seeking assurance that its ore extraction, currently limited to the Kuusilampi open-pit mine, will remain sustainable and cost-effective over the long term.

The question of cost has loomed acutely in the upstream sector, given that nickel is the only LME metal trading within its cost curve so far this year, according to Amy Gower from Morgan Stanley.

Mining pits intermittently

Terrafame's existing open pit is far from depleted, but its easily accessible reserves are dwindling. In April, the company applied for a permit to break ground on the second pit within a 3 km radius, with the aim of mining the two pits intermittently.

"We've been in operation for 11 years and still have 25 years ahead of us, but if we don't get the permit, we will run into a major problem with ore availability," Koulumies said.

Terrafame's existing pit, already 265 meters deep, will require extensive excavation by the end of the decade to reach deeper ore, while the new pit has minerals on the surface, and mining them will buy the company time to do the waste-rock pushback in the brownfield area. Also, bridging the two sites will extend the combined life-of-mine well into the 2050s.

Terrafame is calling on the Finnish regulators to move quickly, also for the sake of preserving nickel mining in the EU, which is already endangered by Boliden's halt to the expansion of its Kevitsa copper and nickel mine in Finland.

"This would leave us as Europe's only remaining nickel mine," Koulumies said.

With an annual output of 30,000 mt, Terrafame accounts for 1% of global nickel supply and 70% of EU production. However, its share of the bloc's consumption is significantly lower, at 12% to 13%, because 80% of its nickel is sold as battery-grade nickel sulfate and exported to Asia, as Europe lacks production of precursor cathode active material (pCAM). Plants in Poland and Hungary make EV battery cells and cathode active materials, but pCAM capacity remains a critical midstream bottleneck for the EU.

This is while the company's production, enough to supply up to 1 million EVs per year, would suffice for almost half of Europe's BEVs if they were all nickel-based. Koulumies also stressed that Terrafame's nickel reduces a car's manufacturing CO2 footprint by up to 5 mt.

Transition toward EVs past tipping point

He agreed that nickel sulfate was in oversupply over the last two years and traded at quite a discount to the LME benchmark, but the trend is reversing. On the supply side, a severe, prolonged El Niño event has caused drought across Indonesia, with industrial water shortages impacting some smelter operations, while the Indonesian government is also tightening nickel ore mining quotas.

The global nickel market surplus has shrunk from 210,000-270,000 mt in 2025 to 20,000-79,000 mt this year, supported by Indonesia slashing permits by 20% to 290 million mt, down from 360 million mt in 2025. In its Oct. 26 outlook, S&P Global Energy CERA analysts forecast that the nickel market will move into a 60,000 mt deficit from 2029.

On the demand side, the shift to EVs is now unstoppable, Terrafame's CEO said, "because we've reached the point where the same car can be sold at the same price whether it's electric or fossil-fuel-based."

In January-September this year EU BEV registrations exceeded 1.9 million units, marking an 48.5% increase year over year, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association, and as BEV sales are picking up, they may well breathe life into pCAM projects on European soil.

"What would also help them is if the Industrial Accelerator Act were expanded to upstream nickel or at least pCAMs," Koulumies said of the EU's legislation that mandates low-carbon and local-origin requirements for steel, aluminum and cement starting in 2029.

More byproducts

In addition to nickel and uranium, Terrafame's portfolio includes 56,000 mt/year of zinc sulfide and a few thousand tons of cobalt sulfide. The company is now launching copper production and exploring the recovery of scandium, which shows up as an inclusion in uranium feedstock.

"We need to add an extraction step for scandium, but it's a small add-on. We aim to be in production by 2029," Koulumies said.

Scandium, as an aluminum alloying element, has critical applications in defense and aerospace. It is also used in hydrogen fuel cells and serves as an indispensable material for 5G and 6G radio access networks.

Europe produces no scandium, meaning a successful project would make Terrafame the continent's sole producer. While the metal's global supply chain is small and opaque, China accounts for 85% of worldwide production, according to Koulumies.

Terrafame's copper extraction remains in its infancy, but the company will be ramping it up as soon as it expands its leach pads.

"When we have a bioheap leach, metals leach in a specific order: most dissolve first, whereas copper comes out only when the residence time in the primary leach exceeds two years," Koulumies said.

Terrafame's strategy was to rotate raw material through the heaps faster, but that pace led to low copper recovery. "We realized this was not optimal and decided to expand the leach pads," he said.

The extra space, once added in 2027, will allow the ore to sit in heaps long enough for the slow copper-extraction process to finish, thereby increasing the copper output.

The company stresses that its ore extraction will remain unchanged, at up to 18 million mt/year. "The innovation lies in how much and how many side products we can get out of that same amount of ore by boosting the bio-heap leaching performance," Koulumies said.