High-strength steel crack-stopper rings for pipelines

International Nickel's precipitation-hardened copper-nickel pipeline steel — there wasn't enough nickel in the world to supply an Alaska gas pipeline, so the steel found a niche as crack-stopper rings at mile intervals, and later as submarine hull steel.

Nickel — our whole aerospace engine technology and a lot of our corrosion resistance and nuclear reactors depend on nickel. Two million tons a year. I remember when I was an engineer working in this industry, they were talking about building a pipeline from Alaska. The Alaska pipeline was already being built or about to go into service, but they were talking about another pipeline — the gas pipeline — that had to have excellent toughness. International Nickel came up with a new alloy steel to make the pipe out of. It had one and a half percent nickel. Then someone did the calculation — there wasn't enough nickel in the world to supply that pipeline in an annual production. So that didn't work out very well.