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This article gives me more questions than answers. - (1) If neon is produced by fractional distillation of air, doesn't that mean it can be produced anywhere?
by csense 4y ago
This article gives me more questions than answers.
- (1) If neon is produced by fractional distillation of air, doesn't that mean it can be produced anywhere? What's stopping someone from building a plant in the US or Europe or China or whatever?
- (2) If neon's a byproduct of nitrogen extraction for fertilizer manufacturing, surely Ukraine's not the only place that produces fertilizer? Are there other existing plants outside the conflict zone that liquify air to get nitrogen for fertilizer, or oxygen for medical or rocket launch purposes, that could be easily modded to extract neon as well?
- (3) Demand is 500k tons per year according to the article and neon is 1 part per 79000 by mass of Earth's atmosphere according to Wikipedia. This means we must be processing 79k x 500k = 39.5M tons of air per year. I don't know enough about industrial gas processing to estimate how big / expensive / many facilities you'd need to process air at that rate?
- (4) It seems like when separating air cryogenically, you'd get not just oxygen, nitrogen and neon, but also CO2 and coldness for free. Once you distill the CO2, couldn't you capture it for environmental reasons or sell it as dry ice or a fire extinguisher?
- (5) You really only care about cooling the air temporarily to make it separate into its component gases. Once it's separated, you let it warm back up again -- but doesn't that waste all the energy you used to cool it down? Since it's not geographically restricted by resource deposits and can be sited anywhere with reasonable infrastructure (adequate electricity and accessibility by pipes, trucks or trains to haul away the gases), can't you put it next to someplace with a constant demand for cooling, like a datacenter, and then pipe the cold gases past the hot servers a few times before compressing them for storage? That way you don't waste all the BTU's you used to cool down the gas.
- bobthepanda 4y agoSo my understanding of the situation, is that during the Soviet years the USSR prioritized having a neon stockpile, and the end result was that after the collapse of the USSR, there was so much of a supply glut of neon coming from the former states that it was not possible to compete on (1) or (2), since ex-Soviet factories had the equipment installed and paid for already. And nobody was really betting that there would be an actual full-on land war in Ukraine that would make dependence on this supply glut a problem. Here's another HN comment with sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30458819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30458819
- csense 4y agoSo I'm trying to figure out if setting up a new plant costs $100 million and takes a year to come online, and if there's no neon then we can't produce $500 million worth of chips a month. Why isn't some chipmaker or consortium fronting the $100 million and starting to build the plant now, as a cheap insurance policy to make sure they don't lose billions in revenue if the Ukraine production remains inaccessible for years?
- logifail 4y ago> Why isn't some chipmaker or consortium fronting the $100 million and starting to build the plant now, as a cheap insurance policy to make sure they don't lose billions in revenue if the Ukraine production remains inaccessible for years? Perhaps because there is a non-zero chance the disruption to the supply of neon will have disappeared long before the plant comes online, cheap supplies will be plentiful again, so they'll have "wasted" the $100 million ... and will have to explain to their investors why they took (with hindsight) such a crazy decision?