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Solar Companies Are Scrambling to Find a Critical Raw Material (bloomberg.com)
Solar manufacturers are being battered by higher costs and smaller margins, after an unexpected shortage of a critical raw material. From a report, shared by an anonymous reader: Prices of polysilicon, the main component of photovoltaic cells, spiked as much as 35 percent in the past four months after environmental regulators in China shut down several factories. That's driving up production costs as panel prices continue to decline, and dragging down earnings for manufacturers in China, the world's biggest supplier. "There's just not enough polysilicon in China," said Carter Driscoll, an analyst who covers solar companies for FBR & Co. "If prices don't come down, it will crush margins."
How horrific does the pollution from a plant have to be before regulators in China shut it down? It really makes you wonder how much pollution from this process was being overlooked.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
6 years back I was working on a project for a polysilicon plant in the USA, it got shelved and the plant never built when the Chinese started flooding the market with cheap silicon. If this new development keeps up I wonder if the company that was going to build that plant will attempt to restart the project where it left off as most of the engineering design was already done.
I bet Silicor really regrets not building their new Iceland plant (they backed out because the price of polysilicon just couldn't support it). They had a really cool technology; I wouldn't support the building of an old-fashioned silicon producer near me (we have a couple in the country; they're pretty terrible), but I supported them. Basically it's based around aluminum alloying; they dissolve impure silicon in aluminum, then cool it (settling it out as flakes, which they skim), then etching away residual aluminum from the flakes with hydrochloric acid. It's then re-melted one more time to separate out any residual aluminum. In addition to the silicon, the process byproducts are silicon-rich aluminum alloys (which are worth more than the original aluminum) and polyaluminum chloride (used in water treatment).
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not âEureka!â(TM), but
Lets not forget a couple things here.
Firstly, the raw material needed to produce semiconductor grade polysilicon (and monocrystalline silicon) is just quartzite (aka silicon dioxide, aka sand), one of the most abundant materials in the earth's crust. So with that in mind, this isn't a situation like the rare-earth metals where china is literally sitting on the needed raw ore to produce the higher quality materials. We have the raw material in excess (as most countries do) and all we really need are the companies to set up production facilities.
The second thing not to forget is that only as recently as 2008 prices for pure polysilicon were astronomical, around 450 USD/kg. A spike of 35% is not very significant and could probably be accounted for by the ramping up of photovoltaic production. A simple reaction of the market to increased demand, which will eventually be satiated by increased production (domestically and abroad) of the needed polysilicon.
I really don't see this being any more than a tiny bump in the road, nothing to worry about over the long-term. Certainly this isn't something China can laud over the west to gain an economical advantage like they could possibly do with rare-earth metals.
IF you produce this stuff in an environmentally acceptable way it's more expensive, a lot more expensive.
Only if you go totally overboard, like say, California, where the wastewater is required to be significantly cleaner than the original tap water. That is one reason why silicon is no longer made in "Silicon Valley".
But silicon tetrachloride is an environmental "show stopper" if not reprocessed...it's worse than the old Roman idea of "salting the land". Nothing grows, animals die, etc.
Silicon tetrachloride is a volatile liquid, that quickly evaporates ... and it degrades in the presence of water to SO2 and HCl. So I am skeptical that it could stick around long enough to cause significant long term harm. Do you have a citation for its supposed Carthaginian properties?