Carbon Nanotubes Still Not A Cheap Material

Stuart Cantrill’s post “A nanotube fix” on nature.com got me interested in looking up suppliers and prices of single-walled (SWNT) and multi-walled nanotubes (MWNT). He noticed an interesting comparison between cost of SWNT and another more interesting chemical on Wikipedia’s entry on carbon nanotubes:

Single-walled nanotubes are still very expensive to produce, around $1500 per gram as of 2000 (compared to marijuana, which generally costs between $10 and $30 per gram, depending on who you know and how sweet the nug is) ……

Although, the Wikipedia entry has been fixed, I was very amused by this comparison!

Anyway, here is what I found through various sources on the web:

• Cheap Tubes Inc (Vermont, USA): SWNT of high purity at $250/g. Appears that the price might be $75/g for a 1 KG order (check out the price list on the website). MWNT’s are much cheaper, around $0.18/g for an order of 1 ton of the industrial grade. Production capacity is 10 – 12 MT/year of MWNT and 1 Kg/month of SWNT.
• Nanothinx SA (Patras, Greece): High purity SWNT at 180 Euro/g and MWNT 10 -20 Euro/g (see price list). Still a low capacity player, although promises to be above 1 MT/year by end of 2007 through a new high-yield process.

Bayer Material Science (Germany): MWNT commercialized under the Baytube(R) brand. According to a February 2007 press release, current pilot plan capacity is 30 MT, however a large-scale plant with 3000 MT capacity is planned.

• Arkema (France): MWNT commercialized under the Graphistrength(TM) brand. Current pilot plant capacity reported to be around 10 MT. Recently announced a joint development deal with Zyvex to utilize their Kentera(TM) dispersion technology to develop various value-added MWNT systems for different applications. Also the sole supplier in Europe of Zyvex’s Nanosolve(R) product line.

Several other selected smaller players are emerging across the world:

• Ahwahnee Technology (USA): SWNT and MWNT
• BuckyUSA (USA): Fullerenes, SWNT ($250-750/g), MWNT ($100-150/g)
• Carbolex (USA): Lower purity SWNT ($50-100/g)
• Carbon Nanotechnologies Inc(USA): Buckytubes, Research grade SWNT ($375-2000/g)
• Carbon NT&F 21 (Austria): 5-10MT of SWNT and MWNT
• Iljin Nanotech (Korea): SWNT, MWNT
• Nanolab (USA): SWNT ($175-2000/g), MWNT ($2.5-700/g). Current capacity of 2MT going up to 20 MT by 2008-2009
• NTP (China): SWNT, MWNT

This is not meant to be the complete list. Nanotube-suppliers.com has many more listings. Similar to all new technologies, the industry is quite fragmented with a large number of suppliers. In time, this will surely lead to consolidation among these suppliers. Already, Cheap Tubes Inc. claims to have the following mission:

We are embracing the commodity status of Carbon Nanotubes. Many of our competitors are unwilling to accept that ultimately CNTs are a commodity. We believe that when a product is a commodity then if features and quality are equal, then price is largest governing factor. We are striving to be the highest volume, lowest cost CNT supplier.