Nickel and cobalt are the heart of the long-range EV battery — but digging them out of the ground is full of oddities. Nickel comes in two entirely different kinds of ore, mined in different ways, and almost nobody “mines cobalt directly” at all — it's just a by-product that comes up with copper mines. This is the story of the very “top of the stream” of the battery chain, where nearly the whole world's supply is concentrated in just two countries: Indonesia and Congo.