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Calling our chemists. . .
4 units of C would weigh 48 while 1 unit of nickel would weigh 58, on average. Therefore somewhat less of 1 ton of C extracted from methane and combined with lunar LOX can bind with one ton of nickel using the carbonyl process, right?
58/48 = 1.2 unit mass of Ni per 1.0 unit mass of C
I disregard the mass of the hydrogen in CH4 since we will need H20 anyway. Besides, 4 units of CH4 would only mass 64 rather than 48. Right?
Still, we recycle the CO.
= = =
Fe mass is less than Ni mass however depositing pure Fe to liberate the CO from Fe(CO)5 appears to be more difficult than with nickel.
Nonetheless, pure nickel and pure iron toolings are fringe benefit freebies from the carbonyl process.
In my chemists' opinion, you are about right Bill, Ni is about 58.6g/mol. The trick is using the Carbon Monoxide to disolve all the metals except the Platinum (which are the main desired product) and use the leftover Nickel and Iron carbonyl for tooling and light construction, right?
Your figures are probobly fairly close, but I bet that it will be hard to find rocks with Nickel/PGMs and not Iron. In that case, assuming a 48/48/2% mixture of Nickel, Iron, and Platinum lets see how much Methane you would need to process a tonne of this metal ore: 1211kg or about 1.2MT of Methane per tonne of ore to yeild you 2kg of Pt. Assuming 99.9% recycling, thats about 600kg of CH4 per tonne of Pt.
If it costs $5,000/kg to get the stuff to the Moon, thats about $3M charge per tonne of Pt. Not too bad if we can find rocks that are a percent or two... but if its lots less, that might be an issue.
[i]"The power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those that do not have it." - George Bernard Shaw[/i]
[i]The glass is at 50% of capacity[/i]
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