Metals & Alloys

this logn high price for stainless has cleaned out the scrap coffers. They accumulated before and when it went very high thet scrounged to find what they could and sell it before the fall.

However, we have had a shift in the market and the only thing that will bring metals down is a collapse in China's demand.

They care not what it costs, as long as you pay the same, their low wages gets them the market

Achilles wheel in reverse.

I hear the copper shorts are a bit overdrawn.

China can mine it's own to pay the shorts and the supply will not change but where it is mined from, may. What about the Silver usually removed when the copper is, yet the copper portion will not really be needed? What happens to Silver and Copper and Zinc?

Veddy Intededestinc.

there is a parallel with peak oil. Lets call it peak metal)insert name here).

So peak copper, peak nickel etc.

If we examine the abundance ratio of the elements in the crust we see we will never have a peak Aluminium, or Sodium, or Iron

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundances_of_the_elements_%28data_page%29

http://www.science.co.il/PTelements.asp?s=Earth

as you can see nickel and copper are quite scarce, and a mine, like an oil well, is a one trick cowboy, you extract the resource and you cannot go there again, except for mining the leftovers after the price goes up, as we are doing we old copper mines and oil wells.

So the easy copper and nickel is going-going-gone, and we are faced with a permanent decline in cheap sources = more costly ones need to be mined.

Forget about abiotic oil and gold from seawater. Abiotic oil is a false theory.

Gold is there in seawater, as well as all the elements, however, if you take the electric energy cost to pump a cubic meter of sea water up 1 meter, this cost exceeds the value of the giold in that 1 cubic meter by a wide margin. It would take $25,000/ounce gold to make sea water economic. Long before that we could mine barren rock for it has a ~1 part per billion of gold

"So the easy copper and nickel is going-going-gone, and we are faced with a permanent decline in cheap sources = more costly ones need to be mined"

This is true unless we are willing to spend $$ to invest in exploration for more Cu or Ni, which I would hope might occur if the price gets high enough.

Everyone is missing the point on this nickel thing. In a nut shell, you can not build critical and reliable process equipment without it. On top of which, any and all "GREEN" answers rely heavily on our friend Nickel. Either find a way to bring Nickel back down to a reasonable use cost or get use to hearing that we cant afford to do anything green. The higher Nickel gets the longer my arm gets waiting for that Fed subsidy.

The past three years global demand exceeded supply.This year the International Nickel Study Group estimates that there will be a 120,000 metric tonne surplus of nickel.

As the people everywhere on the planet wish to see their quality of life improve, there will be continued opportunity for growth in nickel containing applications, in the long term.

In the short term, cut backs in China, reduced home demand in US because of sub prime credit crisis, can cause temporary anomalies in supply /demand for stainless steel, and thus pricing.

The variability of the nickel price is the truly problematic issue, not its average price rise. Variability makes planning difficult, and thus risky to decide to implement business decisions.

heres a link:

http://www.pmpa.org/files/bulletin_file/Material_Impacts_October_2007.pdf

milo

I think the nickel cartel will reduce output by a few % to avoid a 50% drop in price. They have gotten to like high nickel prices, and this is a taste that is hard to shake and with a number of them offshore this price collusion will escape detection.

Actually it s the consolidation of the mines into a few companies that makes that possible, I wsaw a news item about some "team work" up in sudbury just las tweek- sharing rights of ways etc. No sign of how the miners unions will take it.

milo