Indonesia Reopened Its Mineral Exports. It Still Hasn’t Written the Rule That Closed Them

Jakarta — Indonesia has cleared the backlog of mineral shipments stranded at its ports by a rare earth testing requirement, releasing roughly 400,000 tonnes of cargo worth about US$124 million. What it has not done is publish the threshold that would stop the same thing happening again.

The fix announced in early August was explicitly described by the government as transitional guidance. Nearly two weeks on, the regulation it was meant to bridge to has yet to appear — leaving exporters of nickel derivatives, bauxite, alumina and copper cathodes operating on an interpretation rather than a rule.

How the ports seized up

The disruption began with a sequencing failure: a testing requirement arrived before the standard it was meant to test against.

Under Trade Minister Regulation (Permendag) No. 6 of 2026, which amended Permendag No. 22 of 2023 on goods prohibited from export, Indonesia banned the export of rare earth elements and their compounds at purity levels below 99%. The ban targeted rare earths sold as a primary commodity. But rare earths occur naturally as trace constituents in other ores, and the regulation set no permissible concentration for them when they show up as an incidental byproduct.

That gap had a mechanical consequence. As Indonesia Business Post reported, Indonesia's alumina export rules classify shipments by aluminium oxide purity — smelter-grade below 98% Al₂O₃ and chemical-grade below 90% are prohibited under existing regulations — with no rare earth trigger defined anywhere in the framework. Surveyors detecting rare earth content therefore had no basis on which to certify or reject a cargo, and no published testing standard or tariff classification to appeal to.

The result was a documentation freeze rather than a policy one. More than 100 vessels were immobilised. State inspection company PT Sucofindo accumulated a queue of surveyor reports it could not issue.

The unblocking, and what it rests on

The resolution came from the Presidential Staff Office rather than the trade ministry — itself a signal of how far the problem had escalated beyond routine administration.

Presidential Chief of Staff Dudung Abdurachman said exports had resumed in parallel with an ongoing revision of the ministerial regulation, and that the KSP was leading cross-institutional deliberations to set maximum permitted rare earth content in export commodities, according to ANTARA. A July 31 coordination meeting authorised Sucofindo to release 85 previously delayed surveyor reports. Dudung said most of them belonged to exporters of alumina, copper, cathodes and nickel derivatives.

The legal reasoning is narrow: the prohibition applies to rare earths extracted and sold as a primary product, not to rare earth content appearing incidentally in other minerals. The first cleared shipments — alumina hydroxide and alumina oxide from West Kalimantan — departed Dwikora Port in Pontianak on August 7.

Dudung has also said the government would seek a legal opinion from the Attorney General's Office to firm up certainty while the revision is drafted, and that he had coordinated with the Customs Directorate General on the stranded cargo.

The unfinished part

Four things the government itself has identified as necessary remain undelivered.

The revision is meant to define associated or byproduct minerals, set concentration thresholds for individual elements, specify laboratory testing methods and verification procedures, and issue technical guidelines for surveyor reports. Rules governing naturally occurring radioactive material in mineral exports are also in scope.

None of that has been published. Energy and Mineral Resources Minister Bahlil Lahadalia said on August 3 that the target was to complete the revision in roughly a week; that window has passed. Bahlil also said the ministry was mapping rare earth concentrations across nickel and copper export streams, and noted that Indonesia currently has no registered industry dedicated to processing rare earths — which is part of why the downstream framework is being built at all.

There is also a discrepancy in the public record worth flagging: government statements have variously described the ban as covering 17 and 18 rare earth elements. For exporters trying to establish which elements trigger testing, that is not a trivial inconsistency.

Why it matters beyond Jakarta

Indonesia is the dominant global supplier of nickel and a significant bauxite and alumina exporter. A discretionary hold regime — where a cargo meeting every published purity standard can still be detained because an inspector found something the rules do not price — is a supply risk that sits upstream of battery and aluminium chains in China, South Korea and Europe.

The August guidance restored flow. It did not restore predictability. Until a numerical threshold is gazetted, the operative rule is an interpretation issued by the president's office, revocable and untested, and the next shipment held at Pontianak or Morowali will pose exactly the question that stopped the last hundred.

What to watch: publication of the revised Permendag No. 6/2026 and the specific REE concentration limits attached to it; the Attorney General's legal opinion; and whether Sucofindo's certification queue clears without further intervention.