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This is very cool. Just doing napkin math, the US produces 18000tonne of nickel. Wheat yield is close enough to a tonne per acre, so if you got, say, 1% Ni by w
by onthecanposting 3y ago
This is very cool. Just doing napkin math, the US produces 18000tonne of nickel. Wheat yield is close enough to a tonne per acre, so if you got, say, 1% Ni by weight, you would still need 1.8M acres. Wheat grown on the same area would have a market value of around $432,000,000 at $6/bushel and 40 bushel per acre. The nickel at $7/lb would be $277,200,000,000.
- matznerd 3y agoGood math, the nickel per hectare target in the field and in the literature through cultivars is around 400 kilograms per hectare (.400 tonnes per Ha). We are using natural serpentine soils that have previously been farmed and are idle now due to low productivity and the natural presence of metals like nickel, and which is the native habitat of these plants. However, to keep your wheat analogy, we currently farm 220 million hectares of wheat globally. If you divide run the back of the napkin math on that, you would produce 88 million tonne of nickel per year. We don't need that scale, because the total global nickel production per year is around 3 million tonnes, meaning you would need "only" around 7.5 million hectares to yield that. However, nickel demand is expected to nearly double over the next 20 years, meaning we would need 15 million hectares, which is somewhere around the land footprint of oats and rye today, and half that of cotton, rapeseed, or sunflowers.