[New post] The Case for Nickel – A Crucial Metal in the Green Energy Revolution
User ID posted: " https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1gc1pS0dVI The case for nickel – a crucial metal in the Green Energy Revolution by RT Nickel's use in batteries for electric vehicles makes it a vital metal for the 21st century. Dominic Frisby investigates Follow "
Tesla will give you a giant contract for a long period of time if you mine nickel efficiently and in an environmentally sensitive way said Tesla CEO Elon Musk in July last year and in September he reiterated his position in order to scale we really need to make sure that we're not constrained by total nickel availability I spoke with the CEO of the biggest mining company in the world and said please make more nickel it's very important and one year on from those big statements we consider today the investment case for nickel. Nickel like all metals has had quite a time of it over the last few years today it trades at around $19,500 a ton that's a seven year high and the lows came in 2015 2016 and short of some kind of deflationary bust I doubt we will ever see those lows again we didn't even touch them during the march 2020 Covid panic and those lows were around $8,000 a ton however the all-time high for nickel came in 2007 and it perhaps marked peak mania towards the end of the last great commodity super cycle and that was $54,300 and so we're still some way off that and if I look at a short term chart of nickel I have to say I'm not greatly encouraged by the price action we hit a high in February we retested it about a fortnight ago and failed and since then the price has been sliding however if I look at a longer term chart I see a huge base that has formed over many years with consistently higher lows since 2016 and I would say it looks like it wants to go higher a lot higher we're a long way from the speculative manias that you find at the end of large bull markets and so here's a screenshot from the London metals exchange what do you make of it perhaps we just need to digest and consolidate the gains of the past year for a little longer before the bull market can get going again summer doldrums and all that so nickel it's the fifth most common element on earth and humans have been using it since the bronze age but it wasn't officially recognized until 1751. Ancient Chinese manuscripts refer to white copper while northern European miners in the middle ages called it Kupfernickel if I've said that right which translates as old nick's copper or devil's copper because the reddish ore looks like copper but they couldn't get any copper out of it when they mined it and nickel has a very high melting point it resists corrosion and oxidation it's ductile it's magnetic at room temperature and it alloys readily it can be deposited by electroplating it has catalytic properties and it recycles well it can be used again and again and again and with these properties its biggest use by far almost 80 percent of annual demand is in stainless steel as a hardener and the rest comes from alloys 10 plating electric vehicle batteries and other nickel use has been growing at a rate of about four percent per annum since 2010 and the excitement around the metal lies in its use in electric vehicle batteries nickel is a key component for EV cathodes electric vehicle cathodes green energy will play a role in nickel's future says the LME the London metals exchange the rapid rise of electric vehicles and the growing importance of battery technology are likely to increase demand for higher purity nickel and while EVs represent only a small share of the current nickel story government policy and the strategic plans of well-known automated motive players are driving renewable automotive manufacturing and in turn a small part of the energy industry forward which will impact the nickel futures market that was all the LME quote so it's that green energy revolution again and the huge demands it is placing on natural resources Eddie Hagel is president of BHP Nickel West and he says he thinks overall nickel demand will grow at about 5% compound annual growth over the next 10 years but the nickel in battery demand will grow at a rate of 21% he sees electric vehicles accounting by the way for 25% of all vehicles sold by 2030 meanwhile we have Elon Musk saying please make more nickel it's very important Musk likes the greater energy density of nickel-rich cobalt-free cathodes and that's why he wants nickel robin denim who's chair of Tesla says it will purchase one billion dollars per year in battery minerals from Australia alone nickel demand in the EV and energy storage sectors remains relatively small but the outlook is that this will change and the international energy agency estimates a rise of over 4 000 over the next 20 years from 81 metric tons in 2020 to almost three and a half thousand by 2040. and how they can be quite so precise have no idea but one presumes there is a methodology eighty percent of all nickel historically mined says the nickel institute was extracted over the past three decades worldwide around two and a half million tons of nickel mined per year according to the US geological survey Indonesia is the world's biggest producer followed by the Philippines and then it's Russia then New Caledonia I didn't even realize that still existed Australia and Canada those are the biggest nickel producers the world's nickel resources are currently estimated at around 300 million tons and there's thought to be significant deposits in the deep sea which no doubt humans will eventually start mining if they don't get to outer space first sorry the work the wind suddenly really picked up but the world's biggest producers are valet Norilsk Nickel, Jinshan Group International Resources, Glencore and BHP Group and the latitude being the simplest option for UK investors but they're far from pure plays BHP's nickel division accounts for less than 1% of its earnings the small and mid-cap pure plays are where the big nickel bucks will be made and lost thanks very much for watching I'll be back with another video very soon hopefully on not quite such a windy day please subscribe to my channel and I'll speak to you soon you
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