Why is electrolysis expensive chemistry?
1 Answer
Cost of electricity.
Explanation:
The chloralkali process uses the electrolysis of salt water to generate caustic soda solution and chlorine. The chlorine is converted to ethylene dichloride, which is converted to vinyl chloride, and consequently to polyvinyl chloride (PVC).
The materials used for electrolysis are not expensive - salt water is not exactly a high tech expensive product, and the production plant is costly, but on a similar scale to other industrial reactor plant.
What really adds to the cost of production is the cost of the electricity used to carry out the electrolysis. To give some idea of the amount of electricity these plants use, there is a PVC production plant at Runcorn near Liverpool in the UK.
This one plant uses approximately the same amount of electricity as the entire city of Liverpool. Electricity alone is around 70% of the variable cost of chlorine production by electrolysis.
