4 ms·

Most rare elements are extracted primarily as side products. Scaling production directly is very difficult without demand for the co-occuring minerals.

philipkglass 4y ago
Gallium is a side product of producing aluminum and zinc. Most processing of gallium-bearing raw materials for aluminum and zinc production does not currently incorporate any gallium separation stages. Current rates of gallium production can increase 5-fold without increasing rates of aluminum/zinc production or improving extraction techniques; current extraction techniques would just need to be deployed more widely. See "On the current and future availability of gallium": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301420715001233 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014... https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.resourpol.2015.11.005 https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.resourpol.2015.11.005
- defrost 4y ago
  snap! :-)
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Love the way you just slid right past the indium there which is the one that actually matters.
defrost 4y ago
Fortunately Gallium comes primarily from either bauxite (aluminum) or zinc deposits in more or less the same amount (~50ppm). Ergo there's 50 tonnes of gallium per million tonne of bauxite, or 5,000 tonne of gallium in the annual 102 million tonne per annum bauxite production of Australia (alone). These 5,000 tonne exceeds the current global demand for raw pure gallium by a factor of ten .. so it's not the demand for aluminum or zinc that's limiting global gallium production.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Yes. I definitely meant the gallium alone and was not including the indium.
  - defrost 4y ago
    The wikipedia article on Indium: Production and availability [1] is ballpark okay and puts > the supply potential of indium at a minimum of 1,300 t/yr from sulfidic zinc ores and 20 t/yr from sulfidic copper ores. (ie potential max supply estimate as by product from mining other minerals) This is almost double the current demand. Other industry reports are more optimistic than the source cited here in wikipedia but as a ballpark it'll do. The wikipedia article has a decent description of one facet of the rare earth problem, that these elements are always bound up with other elements and are only economically feasible as by products. The other great issue is the flip side of the same issue; they are bound to other elements and must be chemically seperated after mechanical pre processing .. and this can be lengthy, expensive, and leave acres of toxic waste to deal with. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indium
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      If HSJ couldn't push extracting this extra Indium across the line due to lack of Indium whilst being better than PERC and TOPCon PV in every other way, it seems doubtful that one photocatalytic method out of a bunch can displace a PERC cell and an alkaline electrolyser that produce about the same amount of hydrogen per m^2 without the expensive vacuum deposition step. More methods are always good though and hopefully the barriers to commercialising this method (or one of the others) have workarounds.

philipkglass 4y ago

Gallium is a side product of producing aluminum and zinc. Most processing of gallium-bearing raw materials for aluminum and zinc production does not currently incorporate any gallium separation stages. Current rates of gallium production can increase 5-fold without increasing rates of aluminum/zinc production or improving extraction techniques; current extraction techniques would just need to be deployed more widely. See "On the current and future availability of gallium": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301420715001233 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014... https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.resourpol.2015.11.005 https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.resourpol.2015.11.005

defrost 4y ago
snap! :-)
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Love the way you just slid right past the indium there which is the one that actually matters.

defrost 4y ago

Fortunately Gallium comes primarily from either bauxite (aluminum) or zinc deposits in more or less the same amount (~50ppm). Ergo there's 50 tonnes of gallium per million tonne of bauxite, or 5,000 tonne of gallium in the annual 102 million tonne per annum bauxite production of Australia (alone). These 5,000 tonne exceeds the current global demand for raw pure gallium by a factor of ten .. so it's not the demand for aluminum or zinc that's limiting global gallium production.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
Yes. I definitely meant the gallium alone and was not including the indium.
- defrost 4y ago
  The wikipedia article on Indium: Production and availability [1] is ballpark okay and puts > the supply potential of indium at a minimum of 1,300 t/yr from sulfidic zinc ores and 20 t/yr from sulfidic copper ores. (ie potential max supply estimate as by product from mining other minerals) This is almost double the current demand. Other industry reports are more optimistic than the source cited here in wikipedia but as a ballpark it'll do. The wikipedia article has a decent description of one facet of the rare earth problem, that these elements are always bound up with other elements and are only economically feasible as by products. The other great issue is the flip side of the same issue; they are bound to other elements and must be chemically seperated after mechanical pre processing .. and this can be lengthy, expensive, and leave acres of toxic waste to deal with. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indium
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    If HSJ couldn't push extracting this extra Indium across the line due to lack of Indium whilst being better than PERC and TOPCon PV in every other way, it seems doubtful that one photocatalytic method out of a bunch can displace a PERC cell and an alkaline electrolyser that produce about the same amount of hydrogen per m^2 without the expensive vacuum deposition step. More methods are always good though and hopefully the barriers to commercialising this method (or one of the others) have workarounds.