General Chemical Pricing

Goal

To programmatically query averaged bulk commodity prices for pure chemical elements (in USD/kg) and to retrieve direct chemical vendor links for ordering specific precursor compounds or elemental forms.

Instructions

1. Get Pricing and Vendor Links

Use this script to search for the pricing details of a given element or chemical compound. The script aggregates Wikipedia's USGS elemental data with PubChem's registered supplier vendor lists.

# Env: base-agent
python .agents/skills/general-chemical-pricing/scripts/get_pricing.py <Query Name or Symbol>

Parameters:

• <Query Name or Symbol>: The name, symbol, or full compound name (e.g., "Lithium", "Li", "Lithium carbonate", "Li2CO3"). Ensure multi-word compounds are wrapped in quotes (e.g., "Lithium carbonate").

Examples

See examples/lithium-carbonate/README.md for a complete run of querying elemental lithium alongside a molecular precursor.

Constraints

• Environments: The script requires the base-agent Conda environment because it uses standard requests, beautifulsoup4, and pubchempy libraries. Each code block MUST specify the environment.
• Price Precision: Elemental bulk prices presented are averaged and highly dependent on market fluctuations and the reference year (scraped dynamically from Wikipedia's USGS Mineral Commodity list).
• Vendor Links: For compounds, live price points are not freely accessible via unauthenticated APIs. The skill provides a robust PubChem URL that aggregates active supplier links where live pricing can be interactively observed.

References

• USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries (via Wikipedia). Prices of chemical elements
• PubChem PUG REST API for retrieving CIDs. PubChem API

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Author: Bowen Deng Contact: GitHub @learningmatter-mit