Price

Contract pricing for NP1-grade wire into electrolyser-OEM supply chains is reported to have risen 28% year-on-year into new 2026 contracts. Spot pricing in the precision-metals dealer network — a thinner market — is up 19% over the same period. The spread between contract and spot is historically wide, reflecting electrolyser-OEM forward buying ahead of the capacity build-out.

Supply

Global precision-nickel-wire production capacity addressed to the alkaline-electrolyser application is, by our tracking, approximately 3,800 tonnes/year across all specialist producers. Announced capacity expansions over the next three years add approximately 1,400 tonnes/year. Total forward-looking supply to 2028: approximately 5,200 tonnes/year.

Demand

European announced alkaline-electrolyser capacity additions through 2030 stand at approximately 96 GW in the public project register. The nickel-wire feedstock consumption per GW of alkaline capacity, depending on cell architecture, averages approximately 420–560 tonnes. At the midpoint: 96 GW implies ~47,000 tonnes of feedstock consumption over 2024–2030, or approximately 7,800 tonnes per annum on a steady-state build-out basis.

This demand figure — against the 5,200 tonne forward-looking supply figure — implies a structural supply gap of approximately 2,600 tonnes per annum on the European build-out alone, not accounting for U.S. IRA-driven capacity additions, Asian alkaline build-out, or legacy aerospace and semiconductor demand that continues in parallel.

Geopolitics

EU industrial-policy trajectory remains firmly supportive of accelerating the hydrogen-economy build-out; no material change in the week. The U.S. hydrogen-production tax credit under the IRA continues to drive capacity announcements on the U.S. side; indicative signals suggest capacity additions on the scale of 40–60 GW through 2030, adding meaningfully to the aggregate feedstock demand.

Applications

Of note in the week: the publication of a joint industrial white paper by a consortium of three European electrolyser OEMs addressing feedstock-specification risk in their supply chains. The paper explicitly calls out precision-nickel feedstock as a top-three bill-of-materials risk across the industry, citing trace-impurity sensitivity in cell performance and lifetime. We treat this as a leading indicator of the sector's pricing behaviour into 2027 contract windows.

ALKN position

7,026,905 m of NP1-grade nickel wire held in the Alkemya Metacore SCSp reserve equates, at the typical 0.12 mm wire diameter used in modern alkaline electrolysers, to approximately 630 tonnes of electrolyser-compatible precision feedstock — equivalent, at the midpoint of cell-consumption specifications, to sufficient feedstock for approximately 1.3 GW of alkaline-electrolyser capacity. The reserve is thus not merely a static physical-metals position; it is a meaningful slice of the European hydrogen-build-out feedstock pipeline.

Outlook

Three-year outlook: the structural supply gap will drive contract pricing higher unless precision-refining capacity expands materially — which, given multi-year lead times, is unlikely to happen inside the gap. Five-year outlook: the gap may close through a combination of capacity expansion, material substitution research (which is active but has not produced a viable alternative at NP1 service conditions), and efficiency improvements in cell design that reduce per-GW feedstock intensity. We track each of these vectors weekly.