Nonferrous Department

Less Filling

The North American stainless steel industry’s appetite for scrap provides far and away the leading consuming market for nickel-bearing scrap.

Attendees of ISRI’s annual Nickel-Stainless Roundtable, which was held in Pittsburgh in mid-September, were reminded of this by presenters at the event as well as by conversations with fellow scrap dealers.

The stainless industry’s abrupt slowdown in the second half of 2000 skidded what had been a brisk nickel-bearing scrap market to a crawl, and dealers are still looking for the good news that will reinvigorate markets.

In the meantime, "the U.S. lost a lot of stainless scrap to China, to India" and to other destinations, noted Friedrich Teroerde, chairman of ELG Metals Inc., McKeesport, Pa., commenting on the slow stainless market of late 2000 and the first half of 2001.

Just as melting appetites at stainless mills were down, the generation of some types of nickel scrap was increasing, noted Teroerde, who cited an increase in scrap turbines and of nickel recovered from battery recycling operations.

These factors helped prove wrong what had been bright forecasts for nickel prices and demand just 18 months ago. Peter Cranford, a researcher with BHP Billiton in London, quipped that he was surprised to be invited to speak again by ISRI after predicting at the ISRI Annual Convention in Las Vegas in the spring of 2000 that "the nickel boom would last throughout 2001."

If industrial production growth in the U.S. moves back up in 2002, Cranford believes nickel prices will rise throughout 2002.