Earth’s Nickel Deposits and its Energy Content through Andrea Rossi’s Energy Catalyzer (E-Cat)

World nickel production in metric tons, in 2005. Image licensed under Creative Commons by Wikipedia

In order to determine the energy content of Earth’s nickel deposits we first need to find out the energy content of the different isotopes themselves. As Rossi have not disclosed which isotopes react, all we now is that he is using a enrichment process of the nickel on top of the catalyst used in order to get the desired power density of the E-Cat. Recall that we already calculated the energy content of Ni 62 in “Energy Catalyzer (E-Cat) 200,000 times more effective than oil”, but now we will do a more rigorous calculation including all isotopes separately.

The abundancies and masses of all natural nickel isotopes is:

In order to calculate the energy density of all nickel isotopes we need to know what their respective end nuclides are. If we start with a fusion process of hydrogen(proton) with nickel the respective isotopes will turn into copper like,

• Ni58+p->Cu59
• Ni60+p->Cu61
• Ni61+p->Cu62
• Ni62+p->Cu63
• Ni64+p->Cu65

Only the last two isotopes of copper is stable so we also need to look at the en daughter nuclides of the first three. The decay chains look like

• Cu59->Ni59->Co59
• Cu61->Ni61
• Cu62->Ni62

The latter two en nuclides is that of 2 isotopes of nickel again so we can add those processes all the way until we finally get Cu63, i.e. for instance Ni60+p->Cu61->Ni61+p->Cu62->Ni62+p->Cu63. This will increase the energy content substantially. In order to calculate the energy content we just have look at the mass differences between the start nuclide plus the proton mass and the end nuclide.

We can now calculate the energy density of Ni61 by adding that of Ni62 and that of Ni60 by adding that of Ni61 so all in all we get:

We see that the nickel isotope Ni62 is by far the one with the least energy density. So let us calculate the energy densities of all these isotopes. We do this by just dividing the energy difference by the end nuclide mass (to be extra correct one should use the start mass which is the start isotope plus the proton mass but it will only change 4th decimal).

We can now calculate the energy density of Ni61 by adding that of Ni62 and that of Ni60 by adding that of Ni61 so all in all we get:

The number to remember is that one proton capture at the midrange periodic table is about 10 million MJ/kg or almost a factor million to chemical processes. When it comes to Ni61 it has two proton captures until it ends up with Cu63 and Ni60 has three proton captures that is why they differ.

To find the total energy content we have to know the total mass of earth’s nickel deposits. I found a number for of earth’s crust mass to be 0.4% of earth’s total mass and found the nickel abundancy to be 100 ppm(mass), ref. “abundancies in earth’s crust”. So put together the total nickel deposits are,

NiDeposits=0.4%*100ppm*5.97 × 10^24kg=2.4*10^18kg

This finally gives us the opportunity to calculate the total nickel energy deposit:

If we now compare these numbers with the worlds total energy consumption per year, which today is about 0.5 ZJ (Z=Zetta=10^21) , we see that the deposits lasts for billions of years with todays energy consumption. Even if Ni62 and Ni64 is the only working isotopes there is energy for 2 billion years with today’s energy consumption. Of course the energy consumption will surely skyrocket with this new cheap energy, but when the E-Cat hits the market we will not have to worry about energy production for at least millions of years.

As requested, we would like to add a comparison with todays yearly nickel production. I came across nickel production numbers from 2008 which was 1.6 million tonnes per year. If we put this into our abundancy matrix we get,

We can thus see, when compared to the yearly energy consumption of 0.5 ZJ, that Ni 62 alone, in todays production, covers all of the world’s energy needs. Ni 62 will of course need to be separated but the other isotopes can probably be reused which means that only around 4% of the total production need to be used in order to cover the entire world’s energy consumption. If, on the other hand, Ni 60 is a working isotope we have another factor 30 of energy which means it will, more or less, not affect the yearly nickel production at all.