Tellurium, the Key Tech Metal for Solar Panels

To overcome the imminent power crises, weneed to better utilize the natural resourcesavailable. A chemist, Sarah Hayes, from theUniversity of Alaska states that scientistsaround the world need to take a much closerlook at the technology metal known astellurium.

This particular tech metal occurs naturally with the deposits of copper, silver and gold.Tellurium is used for making the most cost efficient solar panels as well as in a number ofelectronics. It plays an integral role of converting sunlight into usable energy. However,tellurium is quite rare, only 3 parts per billion. Given such low supply, in order to meet theever increasing global energy needs, Hayes estimates production will need to be increasedby 40 to 100 times.

At the moment, the studies being conducted at the University of Alaska are focusing onhow additional tellurium can be recovered from the copper, silver, and gold miningprocess. This technology metal occurs with all these metals, but only about 2% isrecovered from copper mining and none from either silver or gold mining.

When mining companies excavate in search of ores such as copper, they mine othermetals and minerals that occur naturally with copper as well. Nowadays, explosives areused for blasting ores out of the ground; the rubble is then grinded up to separate thedesired metal from the rest of the minerals. Hayes study is focused on separating andextracting tellurium at this stage.

If you are wondering about the tellurium that mining companies fail to extract, they endup as waste byproducts which are disposed off. What these mining companies fail torealize is how toxic tellurium can be; far more toxic than selenium and arsenic, and ourunderstanding of how this tech metal behaves when exposed to the elements is highlylimited as well. The study hence, also involves how this tech metal affects theenvironment once it is exposed to it.

Up until quite recently, there wasn’t any pressure to extract more tellurium. Butever since China announced that they will stop exporting tech metals and intendsto use them to create their own products; it has caused panic amongst countriesthat heavily relied on them, like the United States. This resulted in the DepartmentOf Energy trying to access the tech metals that were crucial to technologicaldevelopment and what they discovered was that tellurium is considered to becritical because of its use in electronics and more importantly, solar panels.

Tellurium occurs naturally in Alaska and after what thisdiscovery, it may be true for other mines around the region aswell. There are other elements as well that can be used tocreate solar panels like silicone. But elements like silicone costmore, which may make this alternate means of energy moredifficult to afford for the consumers.

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