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Gallium is not cheap at scale. We can only produce trivial amounts, and it is cheap because we don't have many uses for what we produce. It does not form concen
by jandrewrogers 5y ago
Gallium is not cheap at scale. We can only produce trivial amounts, and it is cheap because we don't have many uses for what we produce. It does not form concentrated ores which means it cannot be mined in any conventional sense.
We extract it from aluminum (and zinc) refinery waste because it is relatively convenient in an industrial process sense, but the amount that can be produced this way is inconsequential. The gallium in all the known aluminum ore reserves is measured in kilotons. For this application, we would need something closer to gigatons. We could produce the necessary quantities if that was the sole objective, but the cost per gram would be closer to gold which is not great when you need gigatons.
- nandhinianand 5y agoHmm.. i was wondering how cheap it actually was .. Can we re-use the Gallium used in this process?? Can we recover it?? Sorry I haven't yet had time to deep-dive on the article.
- raverbashing 5y agoThe alloy is completely reusable as per TFA, I'm not sure why gigatons are needed...
- scotty79 5y agoHow fo you turn gallium oxide back into gallium? Hiw do you separate it from carbon or from indium?
- Iwan-Zotow 5y ago> How do you turn gallium oxide back into gallium? electricity? Cathode and Anode?
- DennisP 5y agoFrom wikipedia, "Ga2O3 is an intermediate in the purification of gallium." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium(III)_oxide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium(III)_oxide So we'd turn the gallium oxide back into gallium the same way we did in the first place, when we made the gallium. I'm guessing we can also come up with chemical reactions for the other two. However, you're right that gallium production is quite low. It's a byproduct of zinc production from bauxite, and we get only a few hundred tons per year. Wikipedia doesn't say what the potential might be if we gallium were the main product. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium#Production_and_availability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium#Production_and_availab...
- Suchos 5y agoYou would still need to spend a lot of energy for the process, which brings us to the beginning. This could maybe be used when we have fully renewable enegry in excess to pull some carbon out of atmosphere.
- scotty79 5y agoCan we do it while it's still mixed with indium? Is gallium oxide dissolved in EGaIn?
- jandrewrogers 5y agoThe throughput of carbon sequestration per unit of time is a direct function of the quantity of gallium and the time it takes to execute a complete reaction cycle. Whether or not you recycle the gallium, the time it takes to complete the process cycle limits the number of iterations you can execute per year, which in turn limits the amount of carbon a ton of gallium can sequester per year. If you need to remove tens of gigatons of carbon per year, you are going to need similar scales of gallium to have enough reactant operating concurrently.
- Iwan-Zotow 5y agoYep ca 720t in 2019