Electric-Car Dreams Could Fall a Nickel Short – WSJ

Sep 30, 2019

Demand for a form of nickel needed in electric-vehicle batteries is starting to outpace supply

https://www.wsj.com/articles/electric-car-dreams-could-fall-a-nickel-short-11569780257

Nickel sulfate hexahydrate, some of the stuff electric-car batteries are made of. PHOTO: PHILIP GOSTELOW/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Rhiannon Hoyle

Sept. 29, 2019 2:04 pm ET

SYDNEY—Global producers of electric cars have big ambitions and a bigger problem: Supplies of a key material are running short.

Nickel sulfate is a brilliantly colored crystalline substance used in electric-vehicle batteries. The ore most commonly used to produce it is mined in only a handful of places—and they include some of the most politically or operationally challenging, such as Russia or Canada’s frozen Northeast.

Nickel sulfate accounts for just a fraction of global nickel sales; about 70% of nickel is used in stainless steel. But auto makers will launch more than 200 new plug-in electric vehicles through 2023, consulting firm AlixPartners estimates—and that isn’t counting hybrids. UBS expects batteries in electric vehicles to account for 12% of global nickel demand by then, up from 3% in 2018.

And after years of low prices that stalled investment by global miners, nickel supply is falling short of demand. “There’s no new nickel in the pipeline,” said Angela Durrant, principal metals analyst at Wood Mackenzie, a U.K.-based consulting firm.

Batteries with a high nickel content are becoming more popular because of the metal’s stability under high temperatures and its resistance to overcharging, UBS said. Tesla Inc. has increased the nickel in its battery packs and reduced the cobalt—achieving the highest energy density of any electric-vehicle battery, it says, meaning a longer driving range. It plans to eliminate cobalt entirely. At a conference in May that included miners and lawmakers, a Tesla manager spoke of the importance of continued investment in mining for battery metals.

Under the baking sun in the Australian Outback, workers digging nickel out of the red earth for BHP Group Ltd. have reason to be thankful for the appetite of Europeans and, increasingly, Americans for electric vehicles.

BHP’s Nickel West operation was on the mining industry’s death row only four years ago. With stainless-steel makers turning to cheaper nickel sources elsewhere, such as Southeast Asia, executives debated its closure—which could cause the direct loss of 2,000 jobs. As recently as May, it was up for sale.

Now, Nickel West ranks among BHP’s priorities for new investment. Battery customers, a nonfactor as recently as 2015, now buy most of the operation’s production. BHP plans to start up one of the world’s largest nickel-sulfate plants next year, and has lined up buyers in Japan, South Korea and China.

“We have been on an extraordinary journey since January 2015,” said Eduard Haegel, BHP’s asset president overseeing Nickel West.

Betting on a demand boom is a tough business, especially for a niche commodity that isn’t easily priced or hedged. Today, trading on the London Metal Exchange is for nickel cathodes, pellets and briquettes only. Buyers typically pay a premium for battery-grade nickel sulfate, which makes pricing opaque.

The benchmark nickel price is historically volatile. It has surged roughly 70% in 2019, to about $18,000 a metric ton, because of a ban on nickel-ore exports from Indonesia that will take effect earlier than traders had expected.

Some analysts are cautious after the last big nickel boom. Triggered by China’s industrialization, it sent the price to $50,000 a ton in 2007 from roughly $10,000 just a few years earlier. But a crash soon followed, after China’s steel producers figured out how to substitute a lower-grade product, known as nickel pig iron.

There is a risk a long-term surge fueled by electric vehicles could again drive innovation and bring nickel down to earth. Still, many miners and analysts are skeptical on the options for swapping out nickel, at least for the next decade or so.

Meanwhile, costly new projects—requiring nickel prices in the mid-$20,000s to be profitable—are likely to be needed to bridge the market gap, according to Roskill, a commodities consulting firm.

BHP’s Kwinana Nickel Refinery in Western Australia. PHOTO: PHILIP GOSTELOW/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Already some mining companies are experimenting with new technologies to get ahead of the game. Independence Group NL has high hopes for the Nova nickel deposit, originally stumbled upon in 1979 by a prospector searching the Outback for wreckage of the U.S. space station Skylab.

Independence is looking to produce nickel sulfate and other commodities, including cobalt, by a method that involves injecting oxygen into a reaction chamber to convert a finely ground nickel concentrate. The company began initial studies last year, but hasn’t moved to commercial production yet.

BHP, Independence and Australian rivals have scrambled, meanwhile, to secure rights to explore land they think could hold more high-grade nickel resources.

Roskill predicts some stainless-steel makers that today use premium material will switch to lower-grade nickel, which would free up some supplies. Still, it forecasts batteries accounting for roughly one-fifth of all nickel demand by 2030, with particularly rapid demand growth through the first half of the next decade.

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