To be blunt, yes. It's mostly a function of how much you need and applying heat to burn off impurities and separate out by weight. Suck out the liquid silicon l

To be blunt, yes. It's mostly a function of how much you need and applying heat to burn off impurities and separate out by weight. Suck out the liquid silicon layer, crystalize it, slice it. Boom, wafer. Sand is used because of the high surface area so lower amount of heat needed to be applied, but sand is just ultimately worn down rock. Quartz for example is just pure oxidized silicon in a non-uniform crystal structure. And there's a lot of quartz. Don't like quartz? It's also in the even more common feldspar too. We as a species will run out of water before running out of silicon.