Demon Copper

For much of the twentieth century, Canada was the world’s largest producer of nickel, so much so that the nation’s five-cent coin was named after the metal in 1922. Nickel’s durability and resistance to corrosion make it a common component of many alloys, with its principle use in stainless steel. While Canadian industries have capitalized on nickel’s natural abundance, its history is deeply fraught: early extraction methods were deadly; it requires an energy-intensive mining process (including expansive support industries in cities like Mississauga); and it has come to represent an inherent contradiction at the core of renewable energy technologies.

As a central component of nickel-hydride batteries used in electric cars, and a common feature of renewable energy technologies (solar, hydropower, and wind), there is increasing speculation about nickel’s future demand.11Denis Sinyakov, “One Metal Will Be Transformed by the Electric Car Boom,” The Globe and Mail, 31 October 2017, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/investment-ideas/nickel-forecast-charges-ahead-on-electric-car-battery-demand/article36784954. While renewable energy is crucial to broader emissions-reduction strategies, one can easily overlook the impacts of the extraction and refinement of the metals upon which they rely. Nickel is a poignant example: its mining and refinement necessitates the displacement of large volumes of earth, and results in groundwater contamination and the release of substantial sulphur dioxide emissions. These effects clash with the aims of renewable technologies, and thus haunt their promise of sustainability.

Concerns of adverse impacts and tricky refinement have persisted throughout nickel’s history. Among its first documented uses, a copper-nickel ore called paktong (or white copper) from Yunnan Province was combined with zinc to create an attractive, workable alloy used for coinage in Ancient China.22William H. Baldwin, “The Story of Nickel: Part I. How “Old Nick’s” Gnomes Were Outwitted,” Journal of Chemical Education 8, no. 9 (1931): 1750. While nickel has long been used in its various alloy states, it was not isolated until the 1750s. Early attempts at refinement by medieval Saxon miners proved unsuccessful: deposits of a reddish, copper-like ore appeared promising but were unworkable, and released poisonous fumes during processing. These miners began referring to it as Kupfer-Nickel—“Old Nick’s Copper,” after a German trickster demon—and nickel was thereby termed devil- or demon-copper.33Philip Smith, Harvest from the Rock: A History of Mining in Ontario (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1986), 59. Despite their initial hopes, the Saxons deemed it to be treacherous and too difficult to isolate as a metal—symbolically, “demon copper” may still aptly characterize the many tensions and challenges inherent in nickel’s contemporary use.

With the advent of safer smelting methods, nickel’s use gradually increased, particularly in stainless steel. Canada’s large nickel supply comes primarily from Sudbury, where meteoric deposits are among the world’s largest. Demand was already outpacing production by the time Sudbury was incorporated as a town in the 1890s, and mine and smelter employees constituted half the town’s residents.44Ibid., 99. Mining replaced forestry as the primary industry, though the resulting increase in worker’s wages was tempered by unsafe working conditions—most notably, the constant inhalation of sulphur dioxide emissions. Mining companies held an outsized influence on the town, and so early reports of these working conditions show no signs of recourse for workers’ ill health.55Ibid., 98–99. While contemporary nickel mining in Canada often involves tunnels running deep underground, early extraction employed open pits, which are labour-intensive and require massive excavation efforts. Early Sudbury mines also imposed precarious working conditions due to nickel’s fluctuating market value, causing many mines to close within a few years of opening.66Ibid, 99–100.

While a more efficient refining process was discovered in 1892, its use released vast amounts of dangerous compounds into the air above Sudbury—including sulphuric acid gas, a component of acid rain. Vegetation around refinement facilities would wither and die,77Ibid, 66. and to this day workers face respiratory illnesses such as chronic bronchitis, reduced lung function, and lung, nasal, or sinus cancer.88Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, Public Heath Statement for Nickel, August 2005, https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/ToxProfiles/tp15-c1-b.pdf. As these concerns persist, so too has the increased use of nickel in a range of industries—demand for nickel soared with the advent of the automobile industry and hasn’t slowed since.

While Canadian nickel extraction and refinement continues to be concentrated in Sudbury, its support industries can be found throughout the GTHA, including manufacturers of compressors, drills, rigs, and other mining equipment in Mississauga, Brampton, and Oakville99Jon Cook, “Mining-supply Industry a Boon for Mississauga Economy,” Mississauga News, 23 January 2013, https://www.mississauga.com/news-story/4242285-mining-supply-industry-a-boon-for-mississauga-economy.; as well, Vale, the world’s largest nickel producer, has their Base Metals Technology Development headquarters in Mississauga. In recent decades, Vale and others have vastly increased nickel extraction in Brazil and Indonesia, often creating products for North American and European markets. This includes batteries produced in China with Indonesian nickel, which are then exported to Canada and the U.S. in a neo-colonial process that fractures the links between production and consumption and displaces the negative social and environmental impacts that occur along the way.

Growing demand for electric vehicles and renewables is currently driving nickel extraction, with one source projecting a 1.5 times increase in global production by 2030.1010Sinyakov, “One Metal”; see also “The Right to Charge” in Issue 02 of this SDUK broadsheet series. This unprecedented growth has sparked concern over the environmental impacts of nickel’s production and consumption, both locally and globally. Sudbury’s soil has been found to have thirty-five to forty-nine times more lead and nickel than the Canadian average;1111Jamie Kneen, “Focus on Mining Giant Vale at World Social Forum,” Mining Watch, 5 January 2010, https://miningwatch.ca/blog/2010/1/5/focus-mining-giant-vale-world-social-forum. and in Southeast Asia, open-cut nickel mines in New Caledonia, the Philippines, and Indonesia require the removal and destruction of native vegetation, often in highly biodiverse regions.1212Kenichi Nakajima et al., “Global Land-use Change Hidden behind Nickel Consumption,” Science of the Total Environment 586 (2017): 735, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2017.02.049.

While concerns for nickel’s impacts often focus on its extraction and refinement, some are calling for a more holistic “cradle-to-grave” analysis that accounts for its entire life cycle—an important methodology for dealing with this demon copper. Life-cycle analysis highlights not only the potential for gas, liquid, and solid emissions, but also the environmental impact of the circulation, manufacture, and consumption of products that use nickel, where electricity consumption and waste production emerge as greater issues.1313Terry Norgate et al., “Assessing the Environmental Impact of Metal Production Processes,” Journal of Cleaner Production 15, no. 8 (October 2006): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2006.06.018.

The silver lining to life-cycle analysis is its consideration of reuse and recycling—which is significant, since metals have greater potential for unlimited recycling than any other material.1414Ibid. Among metals, nickel has an above-average recycling rate (sixty percent in 2018), and the possibility of higher recovery rates in the future,1515André Månberger and Björn Stenqvist, “Global Metal Flows in the Renewable Energy Transition: Exploring the Effects of Substitutes, Technological Mix and Development,” Energy Policy 119 (2018): 230, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2018.04.056. a testament to the material’s undead nature; just as a demon never dies, so too does waste never entirely disappear. This recovery is crucial in mitigating the adverse impacts on ecosystems and human health, decreasing the degree to which this metal contrasts with the aims of the renewable technologies it supports; as such, a greater recognition of its physical and material flows will only improve our understanding of technology-oriented responses to our present climate crisis.