By Melanie Burton

MELBOURNE (Reuters) -Global miner BHP Group is focused on cutting costs to drive growth while being patient on buying assets, its chief development officer Johan van Jaarsveld said on Thursday in Melbourne.

"This is a cyclical industry, and you sometimes are going to have to wait for 10 years or may be more to get the right opportunity at the right price," van Jaarsveld said.

"If we can save 10% of our cost base, that's $20 billion in value that's under our control. The last time someone created $20 billion with an M&A deal - I’d like them to tell me when it was."

While lots of money would be made in lithium over the next few years, BHP was not invested in the sector because the long-term margins were not sufficient, he added.

But for one of its core commodities for the future, BHP expects to become the world's second biggest producer of nickel in "the fullness of time".

It intends to ramp up to produce 200,000 metric tons a year of nickel, second only to Russia's Norilsk Nickel with its Australian operations producing 120,000-130,000 tons and its Tanzanian Kabanga operations around 60,000-70,000 tons.

Nickel sulphides remain the most attractive type of ore to own, given conversion costs to higher purities are cheaper than with laterites, giving BHP an advantage against Indonesia, which is the world's largest supplier of the metal key to batteries.

Van Jaarsveld acknowledged this year's 36% slump in LME nickel prices and said the miner reviews its commodity outlook each year.

"There has been a lot of (price) volatility and I think there has been more coming out of Indonesia than I think a lot of folks expected. As we sit here today, we haven't changed our view on nickel," he said.

(Reporting by Melanie Burton, writing by Lewis Jackson; Editing by Tom Hogue and Sonali Paul)