The Future and Nickel
by Ivor Kirman, President, Nickel Development Institute
Presented to ALTA 2003 Nickel/Cobalt Conference, Perth, Western Australia, Australia, May 20,
2003.
My talk is titled "The Future and Nickel". It has a subtitle: "natural, needed and complicated!
Nickel is part of a natural cycle as well as an industrial cycle. It could also be said to be part of a "political cycle". I propose to break this talk into these three parts.
The Natural Cycle
Nickel is the fifth most common element in the earth. It is less common in the crust but even here nickel is not rare - especially in Western Australia. Life on earth developed with nickel. Future life will have to coexist with nickel – whether the nickel industry exists or not.
Nickel is thought to be an essential element for healthy plant life. So far it has not been clearly proven that nickel is essential for human life. Perhaps one of the reasons is that nickel is so widely encountered in nature that it is difficult to find areas of nickel deficiency? NiDI will give a prize to the first person to publish a paper showing that nickel is essential to human life – peer reviewed of course.
Because it is an integral part of vegetation, nickel is part of many animals’ diet, including ours. We are being advised to eat more fruit and vegetables in our diet. This means that we are being invited to eat more nickel. Anyone having chocolate with their coffee tonight will be having a good slug of nickel – in the chocolate and in the coffee.
Animals, including humans, maintain their balance of metals by excreting the excess. If nickel is coming in one end – it is also going out the other. There is nickel in dung and nickel in urine. Which means that there is nickel in manure, compost and other natural fertilisers. Nickel is in the soil and is organically cycled back into the soil.
Other components of the natural nickel cycle include nickel emissions from forest fires and various erosion processes. Nickel is naturally found in fuels derived from vegetation – coal, peat, oil. We believe that over 95% of the nickel emitted into the air each year comes from combustion of these fuels - the amount coming from nickel producing and using industries is probably only about 3%.
So in the natural nickel cycle – nickel is both needed and complicated.
The Industrial Cycle
Use of nickel is growing – globally at a trend rate of around 4% a year. Also growing is the intensity of use of nickel – the extent to which use of nickel is growing faster in relation to average GDP. The positive slope of this curve is a meaningful indicator of the role that nickel can play in the future.
Put simply, it means that when society has money to spend, it will spend it preferentially on nickel-containing products. Consumers wish to buy products that contain nickel. Companies wish to buy capital goods that contain nickel products. And governments wish to finance infrastructure that relies on nickel products.
Nickel use is not simple. In this expert company, I know better than to talk about the complications of nickel’s process metallurgy. The product metallurgy of nickel is extremely varied and just as complicated. Thousands of alloys and product-related processes produce tens of thousands of different nickel-containing products. It is this very versatile use pattern that underpins the positive growth rate of nickel use.
Nickel use enables so many applications that are important to our society – now and in the future – that I think that it is fair to say that modern society needs nickel.
Talking of need, I read an article in Friday’s Financial Times about whether society needs advertising. It quoted an advertising executive as saying:
"People don’t really need art, music, literature, newspapers, historians, wheels, calendars, philosophy ….. all that people really need is a cave, a piece of meat and , possibly, a fire."
We could perhaps restate that as:
"People don’t really need nickel …. all they really need is a cave, a piece of meat and, possibly, a fire."
But I would add that the meat would contain nickel, the fire would emit nickel and, in Western Australia, perhaps even the cave would be dug out of nickel ore?
The Political Cycle
Turning to the "political cycle", I see two challenges for the nickel industry, and especially for its industry organisations.
- To ensure that the role that nickel can play in sustainable development is communicated to, and is well understood by, all key stakeholders.
- To try to ensure that the political response to hazard and risk is sufficiently mature that nickel’s ability to contribute to the future is not constrained by ideology or excess precaution.
Sustainable Development
Positioning nickel for Sustainable Development should be relatively easy. Nickel containing products enable most of the good things which future generations will want from life – clean energy, clean water, safe food and beverages, safe and clean transportation, efficient communications, attractive long life buildings, etc. etc. etc.
Nickel containing products tend to give long useful lives. At the end of their service lives, they are collected and recycled to a higher degree than almost any other material except precious metals.
NGOs and some politicians are increasingly talking about the need for the future to achieve more sustainable use of resources. To do more with less. At first sight, this looks like a threat to the increasing intensity of nickel use, to which I referred earlier. But I would argue that in many cases, more effective use of materials means changing to better products which give longer useful life and which are highly recyclable at end of life. Those very same factors that have been strong drivers of nickel use.
Why am I so confident about this?
Because of the nickel price. At $8000 per tonne, nickel is not cheap. Even at the low points of the nickel price cycle, nickel is still significantly more expensive than most of its competitor materials.
- Nickel is only used if it earns its keep. The history of nickel product use is one of continual innovation, improvement and optimisation – driven by the need to use this expensive metal effectively.
Nickel price is also the driver for the high recycling of nickel containing products. With nickel in scrap worth a high percentage of that $8000 per tonne, no-one in industry throws nickel away without exhausting all the re-use and recycling possibilities. Consumers and municipalities do not always recognise the value of what they throw away but there are lots of scrap collectors and blenders who do.
Hazard and Risk
The complexity of nickel extends to the science related to the interaction of nickel with human health and with the environment. Some of these interactions can be hazardous. Whether they represent actual risk is another matter – another complex matter.
The nickel industry, mostly through its international associations, NiDI and NiPERA, has put an enormous amount of effort over a decade or more into generating both science and data to facilitate the assessment of actual risk. Currently, we are deeply engaged with a full formal Risk Assessment of nickel which is being undertaken by the European Union and which will later form the basis of an OECD-wide risk assessment.
Risk Assessment is a challenge for the whole nickel life cycle, not just for primary nickel miners and refiners. It demands lots of data. If this data is inadequate, assessments can be made on default assumptions or models that assume the worst case. It is too soon to say exactly what will emerge from this process. If you want to find out more and keep up to date with what is happening, there is a special website on it, hosted by NiDI. See www.nickelforum-EURA.org.
NiDI’s view of risk is that there are some well-known workplace health issues associated with certain nickel refining and certain nickel using industries. The regulatory tools exist to ensure that these workplace risks are managed.
There is one general consumer risk relating to nickel-containing products. This is that some nickel-containing alloys and coatings, when held in close and prolonged contact with the skin, may release enough nickel to cause allergic contact dermatitis. In the EU, this issue is being managed by regulation – regulation in which NiDI played a big role in formulating. NiDI has adopted a product stewardship policy which requires us to act proactively to discourage any uses of nickel which we consider to be inappropriate. In this context, we are actively working to try to restrict consumer exposure to products that in normal handling and use represent a dermatitis risk. The dialogue has already started within Australia, helped by the Australian Nickel Industry Network, AusNiNet.
Environmental risk is a new science. Or perhaps I should say that it is trying to become a new science. The regulatory authorities are having a lot of problems developing methodology which is suitable for naturally occurring metals, including nickel. NiDI and NiPERA are supporting a lot of work designed to ensure that nickel’s treatment is sensible. It is much too soon to say how this part of the risk assessment might go.
One of our challenges is that regulators like to use simple concepts. Whereas, as I have already illustrated, the real world of nickel is not simple.
Three illustrations:
- The maximum nickel content of drinking water is the subject of a WHO guideline, which has been
incorporated in regulation in some countries. If this drinking water is boiled and used to make a cup of tea,
the nickel content of the liquid will be several times higher than the maximum allowed in drinking water. Tea
contains nickel. The WHO says nothing about drinking tea.
- I mentioned earlier that nickel is naturally excreted from the body. One excretion route for nickel, and
for other metals, is in the form of sweat. How this natural exposure affects the skin behaviour of
individuals who are very sensitive to nickel is unclear. But the ideological goal of restricting nickel use
to achieve "zero exposure" is unreal.
- In their environmental thinking, regulators are hostile to substances that are "persistent" in the environment. This probably has its origins in their experience with pesticides. They do not know what to make of metals, which are elements and therefore can be said to be "persistent". For metals, "persistence" can be said to be a good thing – it allows metals like nickel to be highly recyclable, and therefore to become a resource for future generations.
Resolving the tensions between the desire for simple black and white regulation and the subtle grey complexity of the real world is the subject of much of our current work. Our aim is to help resolve it in a way that retains nickel’s ability to contribute to the future wellbeing of society.
Author’s Message
This is serious work and I would urge all nickel producing companies to join with us on it. We are working closely with all the main first user industries – especially stainless steel.
The pay back for all of the supply chain will be future access to growing markets for nickel. The pay back for all participating companies will be market access for your particular products and the local benefits which derive from being associated with leading edge regulatory engagement. Such as better informed workplace assessments and better compliance with codes and other stakeholder requirements, especially those related to life-cycle stewardship.
Working together now is our best investment in a nickel-rich future.
