Is it worth getting silver from silver nitrate? Chemistry question

[Leucis]

So I did a chemistry lab a while back, and I'm a little curious. We basically reacted 0.100M silver nitrate with copper to form Cu(NO3)2 and silver that formed as a precipitate, then filtered it out of the copper nitrate. I tried looking around online briefly but became bored, as well as not finding a few important details.

So, my question here: if you had quite a bit of copper where the price for it was insignificant and a bottle of silver nitrate (at any molarity or quantity) and reacted all of it with copper (assuming that I didn't mind spending many hours shaking the silver off of the copper or had a device that could basically do this for me and the equipment isn't part of the cost), would the silver I collect be worth anything, and if so, would I be able to profit from it? How much would it cost to melt it down to something usable or sellable?

I'm not planning to do this by the way, just curious. I hope I phrased the question correctly.

[Leucis]

Okay, so I've found a bit of information on it and calculated something. I'm not great at this kind of stuff and I'm near 100% certain there is an error in here somewhere or something that I missed. I also overcomplicated quite a large part of this, though I included all of my work anyway.

Let's say that the AgNO3 is the limiting factor, so there is sufficient copper.

I found that 100 mL/0.100 L of 1.000 M silver nitrate is ~$50.00, rounded to the nearest dollar.
Because M=n/V and MV=n, there is 0.1 mol AgNO3.
1 mol AgNO3 weighs 169.87 g/mol, based off of what I found online (too lazy to pull up a periodic table right now).

169.87 g/mol AgNO3*0.1 mol = 16.987g AgNO3 is in this solution. 16.987g AgNO3 costs $50.00, then.

Now, NO3 weighs 62.01g/mol, approximately (using 4 sig figs instead of 5, I'm pretty inconsistent in this.) Ag weighs 107.87 g/mol, adding up to 169.88 g/mol. Close enough, rounding errors probably. (I also really didn't need to calculate the NO3, but oh well.)

107.87 g/mol Ag / 169.88 g/mol AgNO3 = 63.5%, how much of the weight is composed of the silver.

Using this,
16.987*0.635 = 10.79 (and I am now acutely aware I calculated way too many unnecessary things.)

This means that 10.79g silver costs about $50.00. I found that a 100g silver bar costs $54.10 according to this, which I hope is a reliable enough source.

I've concluded it really isn't worth it at all, but I have no idea if what I did is right. Does anyone else have an opinion on this?

I did not factor the cost of the nitrate into this, or if copper nitrate is worth anything at all. I briefly glanced online and noticed one lb of copper nitrate is $9.00, not sure if it's pure copper nitrate however.

[Trekkin]

Having done the math: no, it is not worth it. One kilo of silver nitrate costs ~$2307 USD; the 633 grams of silver inside, if perfectly extracted, would be worth ~$366.

This is perhaps not surprising, given that silver nitrate is made from metallic silver in the first place; it is only economical for a chemical supplier to sell chemicals at a greater cost than all of their components, so buying silver nitrate for silver is never going to be profitable absent financial chicanery.

The problem is really one of purity, though. Pure reagents, even relatively crude >99% pure reagents, are fabulously more expensive than what a layperson might buy on a store shelf. Part of this markup is due to the cost of controlling the synthesis, purifying the product, and then verifying the purity of every single batch in a welter of redundant paperwork and time and effort and expense and redundant paperwork. This is vital for scientific use, but as soon as you open the bottle, particularly in a garage lab, it's all worthless from the point of view of anyone willing to buy what you're selling. Sure, >99.9% pure metallic silver costs $6290 a kilo, but you would not be making pure silver, and the capital investment to see how far short of pure silver you might be falling would itself be prohibitive.

So no, it is very much not worth it to buy scientific reagents to react them and sell them on.

[Leucis]

Having done the math: no, it is not worth it. One kilo of silver nitrate costs ~$2307 USD; the 633 grams of silver inside, if perfectly extracted, would be worth ~$366.

This is perhaps not surprising, given that silver nitrate is made from metallic silver in the first place; it is only economical for a chemical supplier to sell chemicals at a greater cost than all of their components, so buying silver nitrate for silver is never going to be profitable absent financial chicanery.

The problem is really one of purity, though. Pure reagents, even relatively crude >99% pure reagents, are fabulously more expensive than what a layperson might buy on a store shelf. Part of this markup is due to the cost of controlling the synthesis, purifying the product, and then verifying the purity of every single batch in a welter of redundant paperwork and time and effort and expense and redundant paperwork. This is vital for scientific use, but as soon as you open the bottle, particularly in a garage lab, it's all worthless from the point of view of anyone willing to buy what you're selling. Sure, >99.9% pure metallic silver costs $6290 a kilo, but you would not be making pure silver, and the capital investment to see how far short of pure silver you might be falling would itself be prohibitive.

So no, it is very much not worth it to buy scientific reagents to react them and sell them on.

I see, I did not take into account anything relating to purity, and also seem to have forgotten the cost of producing it as well. The labor and equipment upkeep must be quite a bit to produce this. Selling it for cheaper than the cost of the components is kind of an obvious thing that would never happen that I also overlooked, though if it were somehow easier to find a molecule containing silver that was cheaper than buying silver outright, that would be interesting to see how it impacts the price (though unlikely it would be ever be cheaper).

I was kind of curious to see exactly how much money you'd be losing if someone tried to do that, looks like a huge loss. Thanks for your response!

[Trekkin]

I see, I did not take into account anything relating to purity, and also seem to have forgotten the cost of producing it as well. The labor and equipment upkeep must be quite a bit to produce this. Selling it for cheaper than the cost of the components is kind of an obvious thing that would never happen that I also overlooked, though if it were somehow easier to find a molecule containing silver that was cheaper than buying silver outright, that would be interesting to see how it impacts the price (though unlikely it would be ever be cheaper).

I was kind of curious to see exactly how much money you'd be losing if someone tried to do that, looks like a huge loss. Thanks for your response!

No problem; glad it helped.

And incidentally, there are cases where buying elements as compounds is cheaper than buying the pure element; consider, for example, the cost of bulk bauxite ore relative to metallurgical grade aluminum ($600 per ton to $1800 per ton, respectively, although the exact cost per quantity of aluminum varies with the gibbsite/böhmite/diaspore content.) It's just that silver nitrate has to be made from silver, while you can mine bauxite out of the ground.

This does not hold true for purified aluminum hydroxide hydrate relative to pure aluminum, though, because of the costs of assaying their purity. Part of what makes commercial chemical supply feasible is their capacity to effectively amortize the QA costs (and the QA of QA costs) across many, many products.

That's not to say that chemistry is the sole domain of large corporations, though -- the bespoke synthesis of heretofore nonexistent compounds is fabulously profitable and done on an individual scale, to say nothing of the biological synthesis of certain macromolecules useful to science and an order of magnitude more valuable than diamond by weight.

People don't pay those prices for silver, though, and to the best of my knowledge nobody needs unstable isotopes of silver for anything so it's unlikely they ever will.

[gomipile]

One place where this is done is with black and white photo developing. Fixer solution removes unexposed silver halide from the photo paper, and stops working once the solution gets close to saturated. In small darkrooms, the saturated fixer solution is typically stored until a few gallons accumulate, when it is put into a silver recovery bucket where a similar reaction to the one you did causes the silver to precipitate out in dendritic crystals which can be filtered and washed to yield nearly pure silver.

[factotum]

Having done the math: no, it is not worth it. One kilo of silver nitrate costs ~$2307 USD; the 633 grams of silver inside, if perfectly extracted, would be worth ~$366.

Sure, >99.9% pure metallic silver costs $6290 a kilo, but you would not be making pure silver, and the capital investment to see how far short of pure silver you might be falling would itself be prohibitive.

Um, something doesn't seem right there? If silver costs $6290 a kilo, how can 633g of it (a bit less than two-thirds of a kilo) be worth only $366? (I assume that when you say "perfectly extracted" you mean "extracted as 100% pure silver").

[Leucis]

Um, something doesn't seem right there? If silver costs $6290 a kilo, how can 633g of it (a bit less than two-thirds of a kilo) be worth only $366? (I assume that when you say "perfectly extracted" you mean "extracted as 100% pure silver").

I believe that the silver extracted from the silver nitrate is Ag2+, but there's also Ag+, which is not a product of the described reaction, where the latter is more stable (at least in water, I just read). I'm assuming Ag2+ is cheaper than Ag+ in this case, though I'm not certain if that's what's being referred to.

[Trekkin]

Um, something doesn't seem right there? If silver costs $6290 a kilo, how can 633g of it (a bit less than two-thirds of a kilo) be worth only $366? (I assume that when you say "perfectly extracted" you mean "extracted as 100% pure silver").

I don't mean that, no, which was the whole point of the third paragraph of my post. I was referring to the hypothetical case in which all the silver is recovered, which is entirely a matter of yield and has nothing to do with purity.

>99% pure silver costs $6290 per kilo as a reagent. A 1 kg ingot of 0.999 fine silver costs $578.70 as a brick of shiny metal to invest in. My point was that any scheme to make silver from silver nitrate, absent the relevant (expensive) quality testing, is going to be buying reagent grade silver compounds but can't sell the results as reagent grade silver, so it's prudent to calculate the worth of the yield using the cheaper price.

I do, in fact, know how many grams are in a kilogram.

[factotum]

I don't understand what the difference is between 99% pure silver reagent and a 0.999 fine silver ingot, in that case, other than the reagent is presumably powdered...

[tyckspoon]

I don't understand what the difference is between 99% pure silver reagent and a 0.999 fine silver ingot, in that case, other than the reagent is presumably powdered...

I believe it's that reagent grade materials are something like 99.9999999 certain that it's 99% silver and, critically, that anything in there that isn't silver is going to be a known quantity. The silver ingot bar is just *most likely* 99.9% silver, and if it's not, well, the people who own it probably aren't that worried about it - it's not like they're running a process that is going to get wrecked if their silver accidentally contains something that acts as an unexpected reactant or catalyst. Getting that level of certainty as to precisely what the reagent material is composed of is pretty expensive.

[Leucis]

I believe it's that reagent grade materials are something like 99.9999999 certain that it's 99% silver and, critically, that anything in there that isn't silver is going to be a known quantity. The silver ingot bar is just *most likely* 99.9% silver, and if it's not, well, the people who own it probably aren't that worried about it - it's not like they're running a process that is going to get wrecked if their silver accidentally contains something that acts as an unexpected reactant or catalyst. Getting that level of certainty as to precisely what the reagent material is composed of is pretty expensive.

Ah, I was confused about this as well, now I understand. This is a good explanation.

[Trekkin]

Tyckspoon's got it; I would add only that the process of determining what the other 0.1% needs to be done for every single batch, and of course any lots that fail need to be reprocessed.

When I buy reagents for my lab, I'm not just paying for the chemicals; I'm also paying for the time and effort that went into their certificates of analysis so that I can see exactly what's contaminating them. The experiments behind those certificates require a great deal of highly skilled labor working on expensive machines that must themselves be calibrated and tested by yet more highly skilled labor.

[indemnity]

Going slightly off topic, but instead of using a metallic copper, I would use electrolysis and a graphite or titanium electrode.

Silver can be mined by dissolving the ore with nitric acid to form an aqueos AgNO3 solution. It is electrodeposited in a flow cell onto a solid electrode. I have seen industrial production priced at approximately 0.4 kWh/kg for 99.8% purity (approx USD1/kg where I live).

For very pure silver metal, such as for electronics where I might want metallic silver at 5 or 6 nines purity (99.999 or 99.9999), I would use instead progressively purer silver metal or inert electrodes.

[Leucis]

Going slightly off topic, but instead of using a metallic copper, I would use electrolysis and a graphite or titanium electrode.

Silver can be mined by dissolving the ore with nitric acid to form an aqueos AgNO3 solution. It is electrodeposited in a flow cell onto a solid electrode. I have seen industrial production priced at approximately 0.4 kWh/kg for 99.8% purity (approx USD1/kg where I live).

For very pure silver metal, such as for electronics where I might want metallic silver at 5 or 6 nines purity (99.999 or 99.9999), I would use instead progressively purer silver metal or inert electrodes.

I see, that's actually quite interesting. (Nitric acid does seem to be quite useful!) When mining silver for non-electronic or chemistry related components, it's a lot cheaper because of less chemicals being needed it looks like, though that seems like a pretty good purity.
I was unaware that electrolysis could be applied in that situation, this is pretty cool!

[Bucky]

Electrolysis works on pretty much any metal salt.

[navas]

You can mix the silver chloride with pieces of zinc, water and sulfuric acid. Zinc will remove chlorine from AgCl, secreting silver in a powdery form. If you press and lead a hard object on the dried powder, then you will see a metallic luster. More tips can be found on the site, where you can buy college papers online. There is also an option to dissolve silver in nitric acid, and then to the solution add an excess of water and hydrochloric acid.

[regina2012]

I am not very much into chemistry, but if I have some questions I cannot solve myself I usually use online services.
Try to search for it in internet resources. I usually go to writer-elite.com

[Jay R]

This is actually an easy problem to solve as soon as you realize that it is an economics problem, not a chemistry problem.

Nobody would sell you silver nitrate at a price that was less than what it was inherently worth in another application.

[Peelee]

This is actually an easy problem to solve as soon as you realize that it is an economics problem, not a chemistry problem.

Nobody would sell you silver nitrate at a price that was less than what it was inherently worth in another application.

Companies can easily be bad at economics.

[Jay R]

Companies can easily be bad at economics.

That doesn't change the fact that nobody's going to make silver nitrate and sell it for less than the cost of the components. At least, not for several decades straight.

[Peelee]

That doesn't change the fact that nobody's going to make silver nitrate and sell it for less than the cost of the components. At least, not for several decades straight.

Imean, I would have thought that nobody was going to offer a 600 pound plane ticket for buying a hundred pound vacuum, and yet. I do agree that nobody would do it for long, though.

[factotum]

Er, guys, thread is over a year old and brought back to life by a spambot?

[Kato]

Wow... Can we at least acknowledge that this bot is pretty convincing, except for the part where it directs chemistry questions to a writing site.