Talk:Prices of chemical elements

Motivation

I've often been wondering about prices of different elements that may or may not be of technological importance. Is erbium available on the market at all, and is it more or less expensive than gold? Would the cost of lithium render this or that idea feasible? (You may say that I'm a weirdo, but I'm not the only one...). I have been looking, but haven't found any openly accessible internet pages that collect information like that, and so I hope to make this page a resource for that. I'm aware that the "price" of an element is a fluctuating and very poorly defined value, but order-of-magnitude estimates should be possible. In any case the page would serve as a list of references.

Implementation

The way I've set up stuff is probably not very good so feel free to improve or criticise it. For a start i propose the following guidelines for discussion:

What elements and compounds to list

• The element itself in commonly traded purities and forms.
• Isotopes commonly traded.
• Compounds:
  • That are commonly traded
  • Contain mainly the element and
  • Are traded mainly for their content of the element in question (As an example I've included NH₃ which i consider a borderline case).

What prices to prefer in listing

• Bulk (amounts large enough to avoid retail markup, but not big enough to skew world market)
• International market (no taxes).
• Prices averaged over a period. (Or better, give a range, to indicate fluctuations).
• Recent prices (but not "current", see above)

Finally: List anything you find - especially if there's nothing on the element yet. If you know a reference, just including it might be a great help. Add forms/compounds to the list if you think they're worthy, even if you don't know their price. Let's keep it eventualist for now.

Nvj 13:03, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Hi, I'm also very interested in this topic, try to use Wolfram Aplha, example http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=tungsten+price —Preceding unsigned comment added by 147.231.127.3 (talk) 09:01, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

Good idea but it would be nice if the table was sortable. I don't have a lot of experience with tables but I came across this page on making numbers in tables sort properly: Help:Sorting#Numeric_sorting_with_hidden_key Also I think it might be an improvement if the element names were on the same line as the other information, this would make the table significantly shorter and I think it could improve readability. --Eloil (talk) 17:15, 27 March 2011 (UTC)

a lot of nonsense

e.g. per kg :iron $72 , sulfur $300 (perhaps per tone) compound cost less $1per kg but here : sodium $250, potasium $1000 /kg — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:248:4301:6E23:4A5D:60FF:FE32:8309 (talk) 05:30, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

Actinium >$100/kg? You bet, it is extremely radioactive and a kilogram is unlikely to be available at any cost. Having a nonsensical figure is worse than not having a figure at all.213.46.252.136 (talk) 07:59, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

All of this should be fixed now, as the article is rewritten. Attomir (talk) 22:32, 14 February 2020 (UTC)

Rewritten

I have rewritten the article completely. The old version can be seen here. I've copied density and abundance information from List of chemical elements.

Some explanation as of what I was searching for when trying to find the best source for an element:

• Preferably price on a commodity exchange.
• Preferably price averaged over a whole year.
• Preferred newer sources over older ones.
• Preferably from some government institution or a firm which specializes in reporting prices.
• Preferred sources with prices of many elements, for ease of comparison.
• When I could not find price for pure element, I used some compound, preferably the one used the most or which was an important feedstock for other compounds of the element, and whose value did not seem to depend on other elements in the compound.
• Purity of element - if multiple prices were available in a reputable source, then preferably around ~95-99%, not some super high purity. When an exchange listed only the high-purity version, I did not try to find another - I assumed it was the preferred purity for most applications.
• Spot market price or long term contract price, Country of origin, FOB vs Ex Works - did not matter, I simply described the conditions in notes. Maybe this was a mistake to ignore it, as it makes prices harder to compare?

Notes on specific elements:

• I was unsure as to whether prices for protactinium and neptunium are reliable and also did not know what I should put in the "year" column for them.
• Source for argon is for a rather particular use, but it roughly agrees with value cited in Ullmann's Encyclopedia for 1999 (0.8-1.5 EUR/m³).
• Price of chlorine is from CnAgri (2013), CEIC Data was reporting it also, but the price (0.0142 USD/kg) was unbelievably low for me, so I did not include it.

As for calculations:

• For conversion of price per volume and mass I used density column.
• for conversion from price per compound to price of element, I used atomic weights from List of chemical elements and isotope pages.
• For converting from price per radioactive activity, I used half-life data from element and isotope pages and equation from Specific activity.
• Sources for currency conversion - referenced in article.

--Attomir (talk) 15:28, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Why is the price of radium listed as "negative price"? That makes no sense.

Multiple sources give the price of radium as $100,000 - $120,000 per gram.

E.g., https://hobart.k12.in.us/ksms/PeriodicTable/radium.htm

https://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00326629.pdf — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.95.43.253 (talk) 20:53, 13 November 2020 (UTC)

The second link talks about the price in 1921, which is consistent with the abstract I cited - it had some market value, but lost it. The first link is a periodic table on a high school website, which lists price as a number without further explanation, so I did not use it as a source. It's likely that it used price listings from 100 years ago, as these are easy to find.

On this researchgate thread there is someone's first-hand account of a hospital trying to get rid of Radium-226 and paying someone to take it (to manufacture Radium-223). There may be some niche uses for which radium from hospitals (which are evidently paying to dispose it) would not be good enough, but I just haven't found any. – attomir (talk | contribs) 22:02, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

Uranium - depleted vs enriched

The price for depleted uranium is way lower. The depleted and enriched urainium have different use so their prices are different (depleted uranium is way cheaper) and not necessarily correspond. --Pan Někdo (talk) 13:34, 27 March 2023 (UTC)