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Tellurium Price — 10-Day Trend
All prices in ₹ per gram · daily rate, updated once per day
Where Tellurium Actually Comes From
Nobody digs a hole in the ground looking for tellurium. Ask where does tellurium come from and the honest answer is a copper refinery, not a mine — specifically, the anode slime left behind when impure copper is purified through electrolysis. That single fact explains almost everything unusual about how this material trades, priced today at ₹10.43 per gram.
Scaled up, that works out to 104.27 per 10 grams, 1,042.71 per 100 grams, and 10,427.07 per kilogram — figures that matter more to a materials buyer than to a retail investor, since there is no coin or bar equivalent for tellurium the way there is for gold or silver.
- Tellurium price per gram: ₹10.43
- Tellurium price per 10g: ₹104.27
- Tellurium price per 100g: ₹1,042.71
- Tellurium price per kg: ₹10,427.07
Tellurium Price by Weight
Today's Tellurium rate is Ten Rupees per gram. At this rate, 10 grams of Tellurium costs One Hundred and Four Rupees.
| Unit | Weight | Price (INR) | Price in Words |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Gram | 1.0000 g | ₹10.43 | Ten Rupees |
| 8 Grams | 8.0000 g | ₹83.42 | Eighty Three Rupees |
| 10 Grams | 10.0000 g | ₹104.27 | One Hundred and Four Rupees |
| 100 Grams | 100.0000 g | ₹1,042.71 | One Thousand Forty Three Rupees |
| 1 Kilogram | 1,000.0000 g | ₹10,427.07 | Ten Thousand Four Hundred and Twenty Seven Rupees |
| 1 Ounce (oz) | 28.3495 g | ₹295.60 | Two Hundred and Ninety Six Rupees |
| 1 Troy Ounce | 31.1035 g | ₹324.32 | Three Hundred and Twenty Four Rupees |
| 1 Metric Ton | 1,000,000.0000 g | ₹10,427,067.00 | One Crore Four Lakh Twenty Seven Thousand Sixty Seven Rupees |
Inside the Refining Cell: How Anode Slime Actually Forms
Electrolytic copper refining exists to turn impure "blister" copper into the high-purity copper that wiring and electronics need. An impure copper anode sits in an acid electrolyte bath; run a current through it, and the anode slowly corrodes while pure copper plates out onto the cathode on the other side. That is the whole point of the process — tellurium is not why anyone builds a refinery like this.
But copper is never alone in that anode. Silver, gold, selenium, tellurium, and traces of platinum and palladium ride along in the raw metal, and none of them dissolve into the electrolyte the way copper does. They sink instead, settling at the bottom of the cell as a heavy, muddy residue. That residue is the anode slime, and it is where essentially all of the world's tellurium supply begins.
| Refining Stage | What Happens | What Gets Recovered |
|---|---|---|
| Electrolytic refining | The impure copper anode corrodes; copper dissolves into the electrolyte and plates onto the cathode | High-purity copper — the actual product of the process |
| Slime collection | Silver, gold, selenium, tellurium and trace platinum-group metals settle to the cell floor | Raw anode slime |
| Decopperizing | Residual copper and nickel are stripped out of the slime first | Copper and nickel, returned to the refinery |
| Selenium and tellurium extraction | The slime is leached and chemically treated to pull each element out as a separate stream | Selenium; commercial-grade tellurium |
| Doré smelting | What remains — mostly silver and gold, with traces of platinum and palladium — is smelted together | Silver-gold doré bar |
| High-purity refining | Commercial-grade tellurium is optionally vacuum-distilled further for electronics and solar-grade use | High-purity tellurium, up to around 99.999% |
Why the order of extraction matters
Copper and nickel come out first because they are the biggest impurities by volume and would otherwise contaminate everything downstream. Selenium and tellurium follow, pulled out through leaching and chemical treatment rather than simple melting, since both elements need to be separated chemically from the remaining metals. Only after that does what's left — the silver and gold — get smelted into doré bar. Skip a step, or run it in the wrong order, and the whole batch of slime becomes harder and more expensive to process cleanly.
Tellurium Price — Last 10 Days
The most recent Tellurium price on record (2026-09-17) is Ten Rupees per gram. This is up by Less than One Rupees from the previous day's rate of ₹10.39.
| Date | Price (INR/g) | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-17 | ₹10.43 | +0.03 |
| 2026-09-16 | ₹10.39 | +0.00 |
| 2026-09-15 | ₹10.39 | +0.01 |
| 2026-09-14 | ₹10.37 | +0.02 |
| 2026-09-13 | ₹10.36 | +0.00 |
| 2026-09-12 | ₹10.36 | +0.01 |
| 2026-09-11 | ₹10.35 | -0.01 |
| 2026-09-10 | ₹10.36 | +0.05 |
| 2026-09-09 | ₹10.31 | +0.04 |
| 2026-09-08 | ₹10.27 | — |
A Process That Explains the Whole Market
The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that more than 90% of the world's tellurium is produced exactly this way — as a byproduct of copper's electrolytic refining, not from any dedicated tellurium mine. That single data point does more to explain tellurium's price behavior than almost anything else on this site. There is no tellurium mining company to expand output when prices rise, because there is no tellurium mine in the first place.
What exists instead is a chain of decisions made by copper refiners: how much copper to refine, whether the anode slime generated is worth the extra processing to recover tellurium from, and how much of that recovered material actually reaches buyers like the cadmium telluride (CdTe) solar-panel manufacturers covered on the site's cadmium telluride solar panels page. Tellurium supply could tighten or loosen as copper refining volumes shift, and demand from solar manufacturing could keep growing — but this page won't guess at where that leaves the price. For the actual numbers day by day, the tellurium price history page tracks them in full.
Tellurium Anode Slime & Copper Refining — FAQs
It isn't mined in the ordinary sense. Tellurium is recovered from anode slime, the sludge-like residue left behind when impure copper is purified through electrolytic refining. Silver, gold, selenium and tellurium all settle out together in that slime, and a refiner processes it separately to pull each one out.
During electrolytic copper refining, an impure copper anode slowly dissolves into the electrolyte while pure copper deposits on the cathode. Elements that won't dissolve — tellurium and selenium among them, along with silver, gold, and traces of platinum and palladium — sink to the bottom of the refining cell as a sludge. That sludge is the anode slime.
Copper and nickel are typically stripped out of the slime first. Selenium and tellurium are extracted next, through leaching and further chemical treatment. What remains — mostly silver and gold, with small amounts of platinum and palladium — is smelted separately into a silver-gold alloy known as doré metal.
Tellurium recovered from anode slime typically comes out at a commercial grade of roughly 99.7% to 99.99% purity. For applications like solar panels and electronics that need cleaner material, refiners can push that further, up to around 99.999%, using additional steps such as vacuum distillation.
The U.S. Geological Survey has put the figure at more than 90% — meaning almost all of the tellurium reaching the market starts out as an unwanted residue from a process built to purify copper, not to produce tellurium.
Yes. Because tellurium is captured almost entirely as somebody else's byproduct, there is no standalone tellurium mine to expand when demand rises. Output is tied to how much copper gets refined worldwide, and to whether recovering tellurium from that specific slime is worth the extra processing step at the time.
