I am skeptical of the $36/ton claim. The elephant in the room is that most of the proposed process chemistry does not have the necessary scale. If I need a bil

I am skeptical of the $36/ton claim. The elephant in the room is that most of the proposed process chemistry does not have the necessary scale. If I need a billion tons of mined mineral per year to make a dent -- the reality for many of these proposals -- and current global production is a few thousand tons, you have a serious practicality problem. Not only would you need to develop those mines and the corresponding power generation facilities to manufacture the chemicals (which is energy intensive), we may not have the necessary mineral reserves. Addressing these all require massive amounts of capital investment that are not included in the cost per ton of the process at current scales. Buying a liter of water has completely different economics than buying a trillion liters of the same water, and the cost is always calculated as if it was the former case. While recycling of reactant chemicals is always a part of these proposals, they are typically only ~90% efficient as designed (each marginal increase in recycling efficiency tends to be exponentially more expensive). At the scales involved, that requires billions of tons of reactants being produced that don't exist today. It would be the largest mining and chemical manufacturing endeavor ever undertaken on the planet, starting from zero.