The US is a major producer of bromine.[1] It's not at all rare. It's just that the cheapest source is the Dead Sea, because that's concentrated brine. There are bromine wells in Arkansas. It's a by-product from some oil wells. It's in seawater. In California alone, the Salton Sea and the SF salt evaporator ponds are potential sources.
If the price goes up, the use of bromine for pool chemicals and fracking fluids will be affected long before the semiconductor industry.
Part of the real confusion people have is - so many things about current trade are due to "current economic decision making". That is, something isn't rare or unable to be done elsewhere but that it's been done this way for efficiency of all involved.
There's often a really weird undercurrent of nationalism that springs up in these dicussions as if its' "a country" that does something well as a function of being that country, not as a function of an economic opportunity and ramp up.
I'd like to read a good article or book about the tension that exists between efficiency and resiliency. At the simplest level, unneeded redundancy is always less efficient, but also more resilient.
The problem is high-quality hydrogen bromide, from the article.
"Critically, ICL’s hydrogen bromide gas production, including the semiconductor-grade output supplied to South Korean fabrication plants, is manufactured at the same Sodom facility where extraction occurs, meaning extraction and conversion infrastructure are co-located in the same vulnerable corridor."
The production facility is a real vulnerability but the shipping factor is overstated - total supply for silicone etching could be airlifted. It’ll be more expensive but not a crisis.
Given the nature of just how nasty bromine is, I imagine air freight would not be legal over any populated flight corridor. That'll make it impossible to fly into Korea.
Interestingly I asked both Claude and ChatGPT "does the Infectious Substances Shipping Regulations include anything about what routes for airfreight are allowed?" and it flagged it and wouldn't respond, although switching to Sonnet 4 allowed Claude to answer.
Making it isn’t hard. The issue is that it’s such a low margin product that anyone spinning up a facility will not see any decent ROI. And local govt won’t allow competition because it risks collapsing their whole market if both producers fail at a the same time.
This is what govt is good for, in respects to ensuring materials supply continuity for their domestic markets
As far as day-to-day production goes, it’s not a terribly complicated process. I’m not going to say it’s easy, but it’s not hard (in the grand scheme of this industry).
Anyways, with that out of the way:
Quote me where I talked about difficulty of bringup (layperson: “ramping up”) production.
(I’m assuming that that is the “claim” that you think I made that you are referring to. If it’s not, please enlighten me.)
Unless you can quote me, you’re just coming up with something in your head and arguing with me about it. In fact, in my post, I made some light allusions to the not-insubstantial cost of a bringup.
TFA is about high-purity bromine, not about ordinary bromine.
The purification processes for any of the substances used in the semiconductor industry are quite complicated and they are done in few places around the world. For many pure substances, major suppliers are located in Germany or Japan.
The substances with a semiconductor-grade purity are much more expensive than the ordinary substances. Being one thousand times more expensive is not unusual, which demonstrates the difficulty of the purification processes.
Your link does not provide any evidence that USA produces any bromine for the semiconductor industry.
Bromine itself is extremely cheap and easy to produce, like silicon.
Nevertheless pure bromine and pure silicon are very expensive and they are produced in few places around the world.
So you may have millions of tons of bromine, but if none of it has the required purity grade you must stop semiconductor device production until you build a purification facility, which requires money, time and know-how.
That makes just bromine suitable for ordinary chemical processes.
Bromine with a semiconductor-grade purity, like any other chemical substance that may be used in semiconductor device manufacturing, must pass through a very long and energy-consuming purification process, which can be done in few places besides that from Israel that is mentioned in TFA.
At the moment. We could purify bromine gas anywhere and extraction and purification don’t need to be co-located. But at the moment, the purification and extraction in Israel are co-located, which is why this is more of an immediate risk than a long term one. However, it does take time to get new production online and no one will spend the capital to build a new purification facility that will go unused after the conflict is over.
That is exactly the conclusion of TFA, that in order to avoid such risks purification plants should also be built in other places, including in USA where the local producers of bromine can provide the raw material.
However, the construction of such a purification plant can take years, so TFA argues that it should be done ASAP, instead of waiting for some catastrophe that would destroy the existing plants, when this would be too late.
The US production in your linked article is listed as "W". This is explained as "Withheld to avoid disclosing company proprietary data". But imports consistently exceed exports, so it appears that US production is not likely to make up a global shortfall.
Until the cost of local production (union labor, environmental regulations, etc.) meets the increasing costs of imports during said shortfall. Then we'll just make it here. The shortfall goes away but the price would admittedly be higher.
I think you misunderstand. I'm not arguing that the US will face a shortfall. The data above show that the US imports less than 25% of its bromine, but are redacted to prevent the public knowing the real amount. Factories in America are unlikely to face shortfalls of bromine.
But unless we have an extra 250 million tonnes of production capacity sitting on the sidelines, which would probably mean more than doubling our total output, we're not going to make up the shortfall for anyone else. We're talking about the majority of (disclosed) global production going offline if Iran could manage it (though again it is not clear that they can or will). China will also probably be using everything that they produce. Europe and the rest of Asia will be left high and dry. It's a win for the US strategy of critical minerals resilience, in some sense, but it's still a problem.
The linked article from USGS says nothing about semiconductor-grade purity bromine, but only about ordinary bromine that is used in the chemical industry.
Semiconductor-grade purity bromine is orders of magnitude more expensive than ordinary bromine and the vast majority of bromine producers do not make it.
The USGS article provides no evidence that such bromine is made in USA. I would rather expect Japan to be a producer, not USA, because for many semiconductor-grade purity chemical substances there are major producers in Japan.
Korea does not like to depend on imports from Japan, so I would not be surprised if there was a Japanese source of pure bromine but Korea prefers to import it from Israel. If this were true, they could still switch suppliers in case of a shortage.
The issue is chip production in Korea and possibly Taiwan. And that's where vast amounts of US chip inventory comes from. How to buildout AI capacity if can't source memory chips? This exposes another risk to the high AI valuations which are underpinning market valuations.
The article is timely as it suggests yet another unconsidered risk factor of this war - USA could destroy its own stock market. Or Iran could accelerate that with one missile. I like to think the US military know this hence obsession with missile destruction but it is reasonable based on recent behaviour to assume that the MAGA overlords can't even spell bromine nevermind understand the risk.
That is what "choke" means in the global economy perspective. Even slight price increase on such material can cause inflation and that's everyone's problem.
Dow Chemical operates brine wells from which it extracts bromine in the middle lower peninsula of Michigan as well. Around Mt. Pleasant, St. Louis, and Midland. Besides all the uses you listed, it's also widely used as a fire retardant.
In 1973, Velsicol Chemical Corporation, who was operating in St. Louis, Michigan at the time, was manufacturing Polybrominated biphenyl fire retardant, as well as animal feed supplements. They were bagged similarly, and PBBs were accidentally shipped into the food supply. Which led to the largest livestock culling in US history at the time. https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/safety-injury-prev/environmen...
My family's lived in mid-michigan for four generations now, going on five. I've known a lot of people from the St. Louis (Velsicol Chemical Corp) and Midland (Dow Chemical Corp) areas. Heard a lot of stories. Chemical release alarms go off occasionally and everyone shuts their windows as the cloud rolls through town. Mysterious mass bird, amphibian, fish, and insect die-offs. Strange dusts covering everything. Cancer and birth defect rates above average.
The EPA has been heating the ground in St. Louis to above boiling, with a giant rubber cap on top to boil off volatiles and collect them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smHnFXrhSvM and that's after dredging the river, capping the whole site with clay and concrete, and other remediational work. People will never be able to drink the well water there again.
Take-away is that I'd like to live as far away from chemical plants as I can afford.
Ah, this week's iteration of "we're running out of sand". I'm sure one of these predictions will eventually come true, but we have articles that overstate the likelihood and consequences of running out of <some basic material> pretty much every month.
I'm not keeping track, but some of the things we ran out of include sand, helium, tellurium, tantalum, niobium, bees...
The article isn’t arguing that if ICL facilities are disrupted, that’s it, no more bromine forever. It is saying that if these facilities are disrupted there will be an even bigger problem with DRAM supply than already exists because there is no excess supply, no good alternative, and no quick way to ramp up production.
This dismissive contrarian Pollyanna attitude might serve well to minimise your personal anxiety, but I do not see how what you are saying is in any way the correct approach for making decisions or managing risk.
This is not some article saying that the sky is falling without evidence. It is not even an article saying the sky is falling with evidence. It is an article that says that there is a significant risk, due to an entirely preventable man-made problem, where steps can be taken now to reduce the medium-term impact of the problem. And then it lists those steps. Why is this not OK to you?
> The article isn’t arguing that if ICL facilities are disrupted, that’s it, no more bromine forever. It is saying that if these facilities are disrupted there will be an even bigger problem with DRAM supply than already exists because there is no excess supply, no good alternative, and no quick way to ramp up production.
This is literally the thesis of each and every one of these articles. Only one mine in the world can produce sand for semiconductors, etc. It makes the arguments incredibly persuasive and the predictions almost always wrong.
In reality... I'd wager that the semiconductor industry uses very little bromine compared to say, plastics; and that it can be recycled or sourced from other places with minimal technological investment (e.g., as a simple byproduct of salt production in the US).
Your comment, like most in this thread, confuses ordinary bromine with semiconductor-grade pure bromine.
The semiconductor industry does not use ordinary chemical substances, but only special semiconductor-grade pure substances, which are many orders of magnitude more pure than the so-called "pure" substances that are used elsewhere in the chemical industry.
It is absolutely irrelevant that substances like ordinary bromine and ordinary silicon are very abundant and very cheap. The semiconductor industry cannot use them and the corresponding semiconductor-grade pure substances are far more expensive and their availability is limited by the production capacities of the very few producers that exist for them around the world.
If the few existing production plants for any semiconductor-grade pure substance were destroyed, semiconductor device manufacturing would be stopped for a few years, until new purification plants are built.
TFA argues that in order to avoid such risks, there should be more purification plants in geographically-diverse locations, for instance that one such purification plant should be built in USA, where there are local producers of ordinary bromine, that would provide the raw material.
I clicked through on the link that the article said showed that bromine was impossible to recycle. The abstract says "Here we propose a catalytic strategy that enables the selective and mild-condition conversion of all organobromides present in wastes into renewed bromides for Br recycling. It employs Ullmann-type reactions enabled by inexpensive Cu(I), simple ligands and hydroxides in DMSO–H2O solvent. This strategy achieved >95% bromide yields at a temperature ≤120 °C for complex real-world Br-laden wastes."
I'm sure it would take a long time to make this process fit for mass bromine recycling, but it's a bit hard to take the rest of the article seriously.
> I do not see how what you are saying is in any way the correct approach for making decisions or managing risk.
What decisions or risk management can I reasonably take to mitigate the Bromine chokepoint? Or most of these deep pipeline logistics issues?
Try to plan purchase with more lead time, look for alternatives beyond the original sales market, accept alternatives with less than originally desired specs or accept more than desired price?
When are those not prudent anyway?
I can't make a bromide conversion plant, and my influence on governments is minimal.
The push for efficiency, global outsourcing, global supply chains and JIT manufacturing have been great for the economy, but they assumed a level of reason and stability that can’t be assumed long term.
We went from supply chain shocks due to COVID, to a sift landing, to inflation, to supply chain instability due to tariffs, to petrochemical instability due to stupidity and ego. Plus the delusion that AI is going to fix everything Real Soon Now.
I don’t know how businesses make rational long range plans when the major actors are operating far from rational.
The US willingly jump into the Short Victorious trap without planning. We retired our Minesweepers, four of 11 carries are in process for repair, refurbishing, and refueling. Our allies are fine with letting us clean up our mess. And our diplomatic strategy seems to be Because we said so.
So when the big things are being handled this badly, I’m sure plenty of little things are ready to bite us in the ass.
> It is saying that if these facilities are disrupted there will be an even bigger problem with DRAM supply than already exists because there is no excess supply, no good alternative, and no quick way to ramp up production.
Then the title "Could Halt Production of the World’s Memory Chips" is a lie.
Helium has been increasing in price at about 8% per annum compared with 2% for inflation, so it seems like a strong case that we are actually running out of easily accessible, cheap helium access. Since 2006 there have been 4 global supply disruptions and it’s now believed to be a regular occurrence vs not really happening before.
It only seems like nothing happens if you stop paying attention.
As long as we're still throwing away the lion's share of what comes out of the ground, it seems easy to dismiss the problem. Perhaps we were just paying a subsidized price and now the market is getting involved?
Helium isn't a good example. Prices were artificially low for a long time due to the US federal government gradually selling off their strategic reserve. As a scuba diver it was great but we knew it couldn't last.
That wouldn’t explain the 8% growth per year from before the sell off of the government strategic reserve which should have provided downward pressure. In fact, the supply chain shocks started happening just as the reserves got depleted. Shocker that.
I have a half-serious theory these shortages are submarine articles to drum investor interest so smart people like this forum get a feeling they should go invest in industry X, because of course it's a key shortage. Marketed to an audience that likes to think they're one step ahead.
How many of us thought "hmm I wonder what the next one of these is, and how do I invest"?
This argument chain in this article is 100% speculative and circumstantial. The fearmongering that this could "halt production of the world's supply of memory chips" is absurd and irresponsible. But you don't get to the front page of HN with "bromine is important, the current cheapest and highest volume producer is in a war zone, so we should make sure the supply chain is robust, here are some ideas."
The article cites "multiple occasions" in which Iranian missiles got through and hit the Negev region. Follow the link and that's two incidents almost a month ago, when Iran tried to hit the nuclear research facility. They hit one town 35km north and another 20km to the west. Those are the only strikes the article cites in the area. That was in the early days of the war, when Iran was firing their most precise missiles, in direct response to US-Israeli attacks on Iran's Natanz nuclear facility and still...
The ICL bromine facility is another 25km to the west of that town, or 40km from the nuclear research facility. There's not a lot of industrial or residential in the area. If they manage to hit anything, it'll almost certainly be the evaporation pools.
Okay but then "The mechanism of disruption does not require a direct hit on an ICL facility" but then that paragraph is the most circumstantial. The mechanism is insurance rates, which apply for any ship that docks at an Israeli port? How are those going to go up any more than they already are with a near miss, and if so, how is that not just standard above-average wartime inflation? How are the ships with the bromine not going to get to South Korea via the Mediterranean if insurance rates rise?
But really what's the likelihood that Iran is going to fire off whatever of its remaining stocks of still very imprecise missiles are left, to try to hit a needle in a haystack target with nothing else around for collateral damage?
You’d think after a couple dozen “interrupted supply of X could halt Y industry” articles per year, yet these things never actually happen, would cause readers to grow skeptical.
There's a difference between "sand" in the general, and sand suitable for construction purposes. There's sharp sand and soft sand, and you need sharp sand for e.g. concrete, else it will crack and rot.
There is manufactured sand, but obviously it's more expensive than good old extraction of river beds and beaches, which is scarce.
Nothing Ever Happens Bias has served me pretty well on those dubious semiconductor supply chain claims.
The main reason being: materials are cheap - plant time is what's expensive.
First, raw materials are such a small fraction of chip costs that even if the market price of a given material spikes up two orders of magnitude briefly, the market can eat the spike. For many broadly used materials, this alone is "end of story" - the majority of consumers will balk at the price and exit the market long before semiconductors supply chains will. And second, between the costs of halting production and the low volumes of actual materials involved, supply buffers exist on sites. That plays against supply chain fragility.
It's one thing to have everything JITted within an inch of its life on a razor thin margins car plant. It's another matter entirely to have a "potential supply disruption" in semiconductor manufacturing that will, if all supply truly and fully stopped tomorrow, convert to actual stopped plants in 4 months unless something is done about it in the meanwhile. And that "unless something is done" bites hard when you have a lot of engineering capability underlined by general price insensitivity. As semiconductor industry does.
"Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress."
Its an interesting argument but the main issue may be that the bottleneck is not bromine itself but qualification and purification infrastructure. That matters because physical scarcity have very different resilience options
I have a sense of complacency regarding all these. There’s always The One Factory In North Carolina That Produces The Essential Ingredient and it turns out that it’s just the price optimal one and there is enough capacity around the world to substitute.
Everything from Peak Oil to today has the globalized market/trade machine meeting the needs continuously with only leaf nodes for products being the constraint. Almost all inputs have been commoditized.
>There’s always The One Factory In North Carolina That Produces The Essential Ingredient and it turns out that it’s just the price optimal one and there is enough capacity around the world to substitute.
If you're referring to Spruce Pine in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene [0, 1], the predictions that chipmaking would be severely disrupted turned out to not come true because the Spruce Pine mine sustained a lot less damage than initially feared and was made operational within a week or two [2], not because high-purity quartz is commoditized.
I think his bigger point is that it seems to always go this way. About two weeks ago there was a panic about helium and chipmaking and the crisis that the strait would cause. One that didn't even bother to look into where helium is sourced.
I think the world is much, much more varied and complex than these "this is the one true doom" mindsets can fathom. It's a constructed theory that makes perfect sense until it meets the real world.
The simpler explanation is that an industry insider who can publish a piece saying “helium shortage will mean the end of chip making as we know it” can get a lot more views and clicks than one who published “chip making will get mildly more expensive because one of the key ingredients is going to need to be sourced from farther away or from more expensive suppliers”. There is always an angle, whether it is clout, pumping the market, selling you something, etc. and when you are not an industry insider there is little you can do to understand where else you can buy the particular ingredient from so it sounds plausible.
Synthetic quartz can already be produced at 5N with high consistency. It's also rapidly decreasing in price. China has been investing a lot in it. I don't think we're at all far away from price parity between synthetic and mined quartz
The issue is that these areas are optimized for—so we don’t build capacity or the surrounding infrastructure for fallbacks—and relatively small likelihood events have tremendous risk-adjusted costs.
If you have one event with a 10% chance of throwing off the world’s semiconductors, that’s incredibly dangerous and worth talking about. If you have five such things (the quartz mine, bromine conversion, helium supply, etc.), there is a 60% chance that none of those events land.
Even still, it’s worth raising alarm about each and every one of them, because a single failure causes so much collateral damage. But people assume if something didn’t happen, it wasn’t worth prepping for.
The largest producer outside the Dead Sea is China by far, and the only other significant producer is Japan (!) which produces a paltry ~10% of worldwide output. It's possible to produce bromine from other places but you'd basically be starting from zero on the infrastructure involved. The short-term risks are real.
However, it may be hard for Iran to disrupt bromine production. They may also not think about it.
EDIT: According to other links in this thread the US produces a significant but undisclosed (?!) quantity of bromine, practically all of which is consumed domestically. So it was probably missing from my data. Not great for other bromine users.
> Israel routes most trade through Mediterranean ports at Haifa and Ashdod, bypassing the Strait of Hormuz entirely.
There is no "bypassing", Israel has never shipped anything through the Strait of Hormuz in the first place. The country borders the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, not the Persian Gulf.
The entire article is predicated on the premise that it would be bad if Iran lobbed missiles at ICL's bromide facilities, but it's not in Iran's own interests either to cripple semiconductor production, and given the distance and inaccuracy of their missiles, they'd struggle even if they tried. (It's too far for drones.)
Is there an industrial valley anywhere in the world with expertise in silicon chip making that is also situated next to a bay-like area surrounded by brine ponds? Suggested search terms: “valley of silicon” and “bay-like area”.
Joking aside, is this what those brine ponds were for — the ones you see from the air on approach to SFO — or were they just for regular sea salt?
TFA is not about ordinary bromine, but about semiconductor-grade pure bromine, which is very expensive and difficult to produce, so there are very few producers and apparently none in USA.
Nobody will ever run out of bromine or of silicon. But if the very few purification plants for silicon or for bromine were destroyed today, the semiconductor manufacturing would be suspended for a few years, until other purification plants would be built.
Your USGS article does not say a single word about semiconductor-grade pure bromine, so it is irrelevant for this discussion.
All the supply chain posts forget to consider replacements. Not for the material, but for suppliers and sites.
Same thing happened with oil in 70s -- everyone was sure that oil is going to end. But as with lithium I'm pretty sure the world would find another place to source bromine.
There are lot of confused comments in this thread.
TFA is not about ordinary bromine used in the chemical industry, which is extremely cheap and easily available everywhere.
TFA is about semiconductor-grade pure bromine, which, like all chemical substances used in the semiconductor industry is very expensive and it is not produced by most bromine producers.
Nobody in this thread has pointed to any evidence that USA produces semiconductor-grade pure bromine. The fact that it produces ordinary bromine is irrelevant.
>Three levers are available, and they require action simultaneously.
The article fails to mention the fourth lever: cessation of hostilities, recognition of Iranian sovereignty, reparations for the displaced peoples of the region and curtailment of Israeli expansionist ambitions.
If achieved, none of the collosal amounts of capital expenditure and effort required to immediately secure redundant alternatives to the Bromine supply chain would need to be exerted.
Whenever you see an article like this, it's important to remember that nothing ever happens. We've been promised all kinds of things, none of them have ever happened. Nothing ever happens.
Soviet Union containment policy. Same reason CIA didn't really care about the 1979 revolution (until it was too late): in their back channel talks with Khomeini, he told them that he wasn't opposed to US interests and wasn't going to let the Soviets in. That was exactly what the US wanted to hear.
The real head-scratcher is why the US refused to extradite the Shah back to Iran for trial. What a different world we'd be in right now: the hostage crisis never would've happened. Moderates would've been empowered. Iran's completely valid historical grievances would've been addressed. Who knows, maybe the Iran-Iraq war never would've happened. The US wouldn't have provided WMDs to Saddam Hussein. No Gulf War I and II.
I understand what you are saying, but we allowed Hugo Chavez to nationalize Exxon holdings in Venezuela (forming PDVSA), which was a direct U.S. interest.
Why Mosaddegh was denied what Chavez was allowed is not clear to me.
The British blockade probably did more for the downfall of Mossadegh than the US influence on the Shah. Iran's economy was severely impacted by the blockade and this allowed the Shah to gain support within the Iranian government for a coup. The US decided to support a coup because it was feared that a collapse of the Iranian economy would open the door to communist revolutionaries, and the US was not prepared to go against Britain and try to stop the blockade. I have wondered, however, if the outcome of the Iran situation in 1953 affected Eisenhower's judgment about the Suez crisis in 1956.
By 1979 it was no longer possible to marshal public anger towards the UK whose empire had been completely dismantled. Meanwhile, the US continued to support the Shah's regime by selling weapons until 1979, and this was probably at least as important as the coup for the image of America as a public villain during the Islamic Revolution.
This is a bit nuts. USA has hated iran since the revolution. Trump himself has talked about blowing up iran since long before he was in power. The geopolitical situation favoured it (while still being highly risky) like no other time previously in history.
Yes. I didn't really want to go into causes, because you end up going into x did this but y did that. The important part in context is just that usa has hated iran for a long time. But it is frustrating how people seem to totally ignore the historical context of this conflict. Especially with regards to Israel where they act like they attacked iran out of nowhere instead of recognizing they have been in a cold war with them for like 20 years now.
Like you can't understand current events if you totally ignore the historical events that lead to this moment.
Look deeper. Larry Ellison and money is at the center of most of this.
Check out the Drey Dossier stuff and how it pulls lots of these strings together. Jared Kushner, Terry Wiles, Ellison... Lebanon, Gaza, even Iran. It’s all a big business interest grabbing for huge resources in the Middle East and in Africa.
It is not at all about the Epstein files, that’s just a smoke screen, and they don’t care. It’s about establishing an extra governmental organization, the board of peace, designed to take over the civil service, technology, and perhaps ultimately the military of the place is where Ellison installs civil, servants and technology, holding their data and their government hostage. It is designed to be an oligarch government outside of all governments. Basically a super villain ring from the movies.
Look, it is calming to think that Trump is somehow a Russian agent, and not a sign of collapsing political class, but let’s be realistic here.
If it is indeed true, then Russia managed to put its puppet as The President of the United States of America. Twice. Without triggering any red flags from a dozen or so of US TLAs. That would be the best intelligence operation in the history of everything. At that point, USA should just put the chairs away and turn down the lights.
Title says that "Strife" could halt production, so who Strife, a payment processor or s.th. like that? No, the word strife from the english dictionary.
The US is a major producer of bromine.[1] It's not at all rare. It's just that the cheapest source is the Dead Sea, because that's concentrated brine. There are bromine wells in Arkansas. It's a by-product from some oil wells. It's in seawater. In California alone, the Salton Sea and the SF salt evaporator ponds are potential sources.
If the price goes up, the use of bromine for pool chemicals and fracking fluids will be affected long before the semiconductor industry.
[1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-bromine.pd...
There's often a really weird undercurrent of nationalism that springs up in these dicussions as if its' "a country" that does something well as a function of being that country, not as a function of an economic opportunity and ramp up.
One case study involves economic coercion.
(Disclosure: I worked with the author, although not on this paper)
"Critically, ICL’s hydrogen bromide gas production, including the semiconductor-grade output supplied to South Korean fabrication plants, is manufactured at the same Sodom facility where extraction occurs, meaning extraction and conversion infrastructure are co-located in the same vulnerable corridor."
Interestingly I asked both Claude and ChatGPT "does the Infectious Substances Shipping Regulations include anything about what routes for airfreight are allowed?" and it flagged it and wouldn't respond, although switching to Sonnet 4 allowed Claude to answer.
This is what govt is good for, in respects to ensuring materials supply continuity for their domestic markets
Anyways, with that out of the way:
Quote me where I talked about difficulty of bringup (layperson: “ramping up”) production.
(I’m assuming that that is the “claim” that you think I made that you are referring to. If it’s not, please enlighten me.)
Unless you can quote me, you’re just coming up with something in your head and arguing with me about it. In fact, in my post, I made some light allusions to the not-insubstantial cost of a bringup.
The purification processes for any of the substances used in the semiconductor industry are quite complicated and they are done in few places around the world. For many pure substances, major suppliers are located in Germany or Japan.
The substances with a semiconductor-grade purity are much more expensive than the ordinary substances. Being one thousand times more expensive is not unusual, which demonstrates the difficulty of the purification processes.
Bromine itself is extremely cheap and easy to produce, like silicon.
Nevertheless pure bromine and pure silicon are very expensive and they are produced in few places around the world.
So you may have millions of tons of bromine, but if none of it has the required purity grade you must stop semiconductor device production until you build a purification facility, which requires money, time and know-how.
Bromine with a semiconductor-grade purity, like any other chemical substance that may be used in semiconductor device manufacturing, must pass through a very long and energy-consuming purification process, which can be done in few places besides that from Israel that is mentioned in TFA.
At the moment. We could purify bromine gas anywhere and extraction and purification don’t need to be co-located. But at the moment, the purification and extraction in Israel are co-located, which is why this is more of an immediate risk than a long term one. However, it does take time to get new production online and no one will spend the capital to build a new purification facility that will go unused after the conflict is over.
However, the construction of such a purification plant can take years, so TFA argues that it should be done ASAP, instead of waiting for some catastrophe that would destroy the existing plants, when this would be too late.
But unless we have an extra 250 million tonnes of production capacity sitting on the sidelines, which would probably mean more than doubling our total output, we're not going to make up the shortfall for anyone else. We're talking about the majority of (disclosed) global production going offline if Iran could manage it (though again it is not clear that they can or will). China will also probably be using everything that they produce. Europe and the rest of Asia will be left high and dry. It's a win for the US strategy of critical minerals resilience, in some sense, but it's still a problem.
Semiconductor-grade purity bromine is orders of magnitude more expensive than ordinary bromine and the vast majority of bromine producers do not make it.
The USGS article provides no evidence that such bromine is made in USA. I would rather expect Japan to be a producer, not USA, because for many semiconductor-grade purity chemical substances there are major producers in Japan.
Korea does not like to depend on imports from Japan, so I would not be surprised if there was a Japanese source of pure bromine but Korea prefers to import it from Israel. If this were true, they could still switch suppliers in case of a shortage.
The article is timely as it suggests yet another unconsidered risk factor of this war - USA could destroy its own stock market. Or Iran could accelerate that with one missile. I like to think the US military know this hence obsession with missile destruction but it is reasonable based on recent behaviour to assume that the MAGA overlords can't even spell bromine nevermind understand the risk.
That is what "choke" means in the global economy perspective. Even slight price increase on such material can cause inflation and that's everyone's problem.
In 1973, Velsicol Chemical Corporation, who was operating in St. Louis, Michigan at the time, was manufacturing Polybrominated biphenyl fire retardant, as well as animal feed supplements. They were bagged similarly, and PBBs were accidentally shipped into the food supply. Which led to the largest livestock culling in US history at the time. https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/safety-injury-prev/environmen...
The EPA has been heating the ground in St. Louis to above boiling, with a giant rubber cap on top to boil off volatiles and collect them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smHnFXrhSvM and that's after dredging the river, capping the whole site with clay and concrete, and other remediational work. People will never be able to drink the well water there again.
Take-away is that I'd like to live as far away from chemical plants as I can afford.
I'm not keeping track, but some of the things we ran out of include sand, helium, tellurium, tantalum, niobium, bees...
This dismissive contrarian Pollyanna attitude might serve well to minimise your personal anxiety, but I do not see how what you are saying is in any way the correct approach for making decisions or managing risk.
This is not some article saying that the sky is falling without evidence. It is not even an article saying the sky is falling with evidence. It is an article that says that there is a significant risk, due to an entirely preventable man-made problem, where steps can be taken now to reduce the medium-term impact of the problem. And then it lists those steps. Why is this not OK to you?
This is literally the thesis of each and every one of these articles. Only one mine in the world can produce sand for semiconductors, etc. It makes the arguments incredibly persuasive and the predictions almost always wrong.
In reality... I'd wager that the semiconductor industry uses very little bromine compared to say, plastics; and that it can be recycled or sourced from other places with minimal technological investment (e.g., as a simple byproduct of salt production in the US).
The semiconductor industry does not use ordinary chemical substances, but only special semiconductor-grade pure substances, which are many orders of magnitude more pure than the so-called "pure" substances that are used elsewhere in the chemical industry.
It is absolutely irrelevant that substances like ordinary bromine and ordinary silicon are very abundant and very cheap. The semiconductor industry cannot use them and the corresponding semiconductor-grade pure substances are far more expensive and their availability is limited by the production capacities of the very few producers that exist for them around the world.
If the few existing production plants for any semiconductor-grade pure substance were destroyed, semiconductor device manufacturing would be stopped for a few years, until new purification plants are built.
TFA argues that in order to avoid such risks, there should be more purification plants in geographically-diverse locations, for instance that one such purification plant should be built in USA, where there are local producers of ordinary bromine, that would provide the raw material.
I'm sure it would take a long time to make this process fit for mass bromine recycling, but it's a bit hard to take the rest of the article seriously.
Of course any of these problems can be solved in a long time, 5-10 years.
The article is talking about the problems of between potentially supply being shut off tomorrow and being fixed in "a long time". Not good times.
What decisions or risk management can I reasonably take to mitigate the Bromine chokepoint? Or most of these deep pipeline logistics issues?
Try to plan purchase with more lead time, look for alternatives beyond the original sales market, accept alternatives with less than originally desired specs or accept more than desired price?
When are those not prudent anyway?
I can't make a bromide conversion plant, and my influence on governments is minimal.
We went from supply chain shocks due to COVID, to a sift landing, to inflation, to supply chain instability due to tariffs, to petrochemical instability due to stupidity and ego. Plus the delusion that AI is going to fix everything Real Soon Now.
I don’t know how businesses make rational long range plans when the major actors are operating far from rational.
The US willingly jump into the Short Victorious trap without planning. We retired our Minesweepers, four of 11 carries are in process for repair, refurbishing, and refueling. Our allies are fine with letting us clean up our mess. And our diplomatic strategy seems to be Because we said so.
So when the big things are being handled this badly, I’m sure plenty of little things are ready to bite us in the ass.
Then the title "Could Halt Production of the World’s Memory Chips" is a lie.
It only seems like nothing happens if you stop paying attention.
How many of us thought "hmm I wonder what the next one of these is, and how do I invest"?
The article cites "multiple occasions" in which Iranian missiles got through and hit the Negev region. Follow the link and that's two incidents almost a month ago, when Iran tried to hit the nuclear research facility. They hit one town 35km north and another 20km to the west. Those are the only strikes the article cites in the area. That was in the early days of the war, when Iran was firing their most precise missiles, in direct response to US-Israeli attacks on Iran's Natanz nuclear facility and still...
The ICL bromine facility is another 25km to the west of that town, or 40km from the nuclear research facility. There's not a lot of industrial or residential in the area. If they manage to hit anything, it'll almost certainly be the evaporation pools.
Okay but then "The mechanism of disruption does not require a direct hit on an ICL facility" but then that paragraph is the most circumstantial. The mechanism is insurance rates, which apply for any ship that docks at an Israeli port? How are those going to go up any more than they already are with a near miss, and if so, how is that not just standard above-average wartime inflation? How are the ships with the bromine not going to get to South Korea via the Mediterranean if insurance rates rise?
But really what's the likelihood that Iran is going to fire off whatever of its remaining stocks of still very imprecise missiles are left, to try to hit a needle in a haystack target with nothing else around for collateral damage?
This is a difficult target, with far more defences to overwhelm.
Doing so would have far-reaching consequences.
https://www.recyclingtoday.com/news/aluminum-association-com...
I guess not.
So for some people it will run out based on that, but it will never be gone.
There is manufactured sand, but obviously it's more expensive than good old extraction of river beds and beaches, which is scarce.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140705163239/http://na.unep.ne...
The main reason being: materials are cheap - plant time is what's expensive.
First, raw materials are such a small fraction of chip costs that even if the market price of a given material spikes up two orders of magnitude briefly, the market can eat the spike. For many broadly used materials, this alone is "end of story" - the majority of consumers will balk at the price and exit the market long before semiconductors supply chains will. And second, between the costs of halting production and the low volumes of actual materials involved, supply buffers exist on sites. That plays against supply chain fragility.
It's one thing to have everything JITted within an inch of its life on a razor thin margins car plant. It's another matter entirely to have a "potential supply disruption" in semiconductor manufacturing that will, if all supply truly and fully stopped tomorrow, convert to actual stopped plants in 4 months unless something is done about it in the meanwhile. And that "unless something is done" bites hard when you have a lot of engineering capability underlined by general price insensitivity. As semiconductor industry does.
"Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress."
https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/11/ukraine_neon_supplies...
Everything from Peak Oil to today has the globalized market/trade machine meeting the needs continuously with only leaf nodes for products being the constraint. Almost all inputs have been commoditized.
If you're referring to Spruce Pine in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene [0, 1], the predictions that chipmaking would be severely disrupted turned out to not come true because the Spruce Pine mine sustained a lot less damage than initially feared and was made operational within a week or two [2], not because high-purity quartz is commoditized.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2024/09/30/nx-s1-5133462/hurricane-helen...
[1] https://www.aveva.com/en/our-industrial-life/type/article/hu...
[2] https://www.cbs17.com/news/north-carolina-news/spruce-pine-q...
I think the world is much, much more varied and complex than these "this is the one true doom" mindsets can fathom. It's a constructed theory that makes perfect sense until it meets the real world.
If you have one event with a 10% chance of throwing off the world’s semiconductors, that’s incredibly dangerous and worth talking about. If you have five such things (the quartz mine, bromine conversion, helium supply, etc.), there is a 60% chance that none of those events land.
Even still, it’s worth raising alarm about each and every one of them, because a single failure causes so much collateral damage. But people assume if something didn’t happen, it wasn’t worth prepping for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromine#Occurrence_and_product...
The largest producer outside the Dead Sea is China by far, and the only other significant producer is Japan (!) which produces a paltry ~10% of worldwide output. It's possible to produce bromine from other places but you'd basically be starting from zero on the infrastructure involved. The short-term risks are real.
https://www.reportlinker.com/dataset/6b01d1a976f7ec9db71e35b...
However, it may be hard for Iran to disrupt bromine production. They may also not think about it.
EDIT: According to other links in this thread the US produces a significant but undisclosed (?!) quantity of bromine, practically all of which is consumed domestically. So it was probably missing from my data. Not great for other bromine users.
You can’t have slack in a system and be efficient, because it would be more efficient to use up all 100% of the (cheapest) capacity.
There is a fundamental tradeoff between the two that capitalists chasing 1% margins discover only when there is a disaster somewhere.
There is no "bypassing", Israel has never shipped anything through the Strait of Hormuz in the first place. The country borders the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, not the Persian Gulf.
The entire article is predicated on the premise that it would be bad if Iran lobbed missiles at ICL's bromide facilities, but it's not in Iran's own interests either to cripple semiconductor production, and given the distance and inaccuracy of their missiles, they'd struggle even if they tried. (It's too far for drones.)
the current generation of drones - using cheap ICE engines from mopeds and small bikes - gets up to 2000km range.
Joking aside, is this what those brine ponds were for — the ones you see from the air on approach to SFO — or were they just for regular sea salt?
TLDR: historical brine production and modern wetlands restoration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Salt_Ponds
https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026.pdf
One of the last things anyone is going to run out of.
Nobody will ever run out of bromine or of silicon. But if the very few purification plants for silicon or for bromine were destroyed today, the semiconductor manufacturing would be suspended for a few years, until other purification plants would be built.
Your USGS article does not say a single word about semiconductor-grade pure bromine, so it is irrelevant for this discussion.
Same thing happened with oil in 70s -- everyone was sure that oil is going to end. But as with lithium I'm pretty sure the world would find another place to source bromine.
Why do I feel like every war is an opportunity to create artificial scarcity?
TFA is not about ordinary bromine used in the chemical industry, which is extremely cheap and easily available everywhere.
TFA is about semiconductor-grade pure bromine, which, like all chemical substances used in the semiconductor industry is very expensive and it is not produced by most bromine producers.
Nobody in this thread has pointed to any evidence that USA produces semiconductor-grade pure bromine. The fact that it produces ordinary bromine is irrelevant.
The article fails to mention the fourth lever: cessation of hostilities, recognition of Iranian sovereignty, reparations for the displaced peoples of the region and curtailment of Israeli expansionist ambitions.
If achieved, none of the collosal amounts of capital expenditure and effort required to immediately secure redundant alternatives to the Bromine supply chain would need to be exerted.
Wait what?
Really - “ At ICL’s Sdom facility, the Dead Sea brines…”
I always assumed it was gone for good … weird. I did not know that name was still in use …
That's why biological systems look so wasteful (chlorophyll reflecting the more abundant wavelength, etc.)
I really don't understand the motivation, as British Petroleum (BP) was not a direct U.S. interest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
The real head-scratcher is why the US refused to extradite the Shah back to Iran for trial. What a different world we'd be in right now: the hostage crisis never would've happened. Moderates would've been empowered. Iran's completely valid historical grievances would've been addressed. Who knows, maybe the Iran-Iraq war never would've happened. The US wouldn't have provided WMDs to Saddam Hussein. No Gulf War I and II.
Why Mosaddegh was denied what Chavez was allowed is not clear to me.
By 1979 it was no longer possible to marshal public anger towards the UK whose empire had been completely dismantled. Meanwhile, the US continued to support the Shah's regime by selling weapons until 1979, and this was probably at least as important as the coup for the image of America as a public villain during the Islamic Revolution.
Essentially cowards.
and the reckoning will come anyway.
Not everything is about epstein.
Since the revolutionaries declared themselves enemies of America, took hostage US embassy workers and tortured them for over a year.*
Agreed that this isn’t about Epstein though. According to the Biden DoJ, Iran attempted to assassinate Trump. He’s rather vindictive.
Like you can't understand current events if you totally ignore the historical events that lead to this moment.
Check out the Drey Dossier stuff and how it pulls lots of these strings together. Jared Kushner, Terry Wiles, Ellison... Lebanon, Gaza, even Iran. It’s all a big business interest grabbing for huge resources in the Middle East and in Africa.
It is not at all about the Epstein files, that’s just a smoke screen, and they don’t care. It’s about establishing an extra governmental organization, the board of peace, designed to take over the civil service, technology, and perhaps ultimately the military of the place is where Ellison installs civil, servants and technology, holding their data and their government hostage. It is designed to be an oligarch government outside of all governments. Basically a super villain ring from the movies.
If it is indeed true, then Russia managed to put its puppet as The President of the United States of America. Twice. Without triggering any red flags from a dozen or so of US TLAs. That would be the best intelligence operation in the history of everything. At that point, USA should just put the chairs away and turn down the lights.
Epstein files yes, I grant you that.
I hate title case.