17 ms·
The Bromine Chokepoint
- chromacity 6mo agoAh, 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...
- baq 6mo agoNothing ever happens eh?
- ACCount37 6mo agoNothing 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.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- csnover 6mo agoThe 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?
- chromacity 6mo ago> 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).
- weird_tentacles 6mo ago[dead]
- zasz 6mo agoI 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.
- vlovich123 6mo agoHelium 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.
- rootusrootus 6mo agoAs 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?
- nradov 6mo agoHelium 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.
- vlovich123 6mo agoThat 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.
- nradov 6mo agoI think I heard we're also running out of attention span?
- weird_tentacles 6mo ago[dead]
- jubilanti 6mo agoThis 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?
- chasil 6mo agoAs I posted elsewhere today, Iran has already inflicted significant damage on two regional aluminum smelters. 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-comments-on-attacks-on-persian-gulf-industry-infrastructure/ https://www.recyclingtoday.com/news/aluminum-association-com...
- refurb 6mo agoYou’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. I guess not.
- HerbManic 6mo agoWe will never run out of almost anything but pricing can go up (and down) as availability relative to demand changes. So for some people it will run out based on that, but it will never be gone.
- dimaggiosghost 6mo agoI 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"?
- cess11 6mo agoThere'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. https://web.archive.org/web/20140705163239/http://na.unep.net/geas/getUNEPPageWithArticleIDScript.php?article_id=110 https://web.archive.org/web/20140705163239/http://na.unep.ne...
- arjie 6mo agoI 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.
- MontyCarloHall 6mo ago>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. [0] https://www.npr.org/2024/09/30/nx-s1-5133462/hurricane-helene-quartz-microchips-solar-panels-spruce-pine https://www.npr.org/2024/09/30/nx-s1-5133462/hurricane-helen... [1] https://www.aveva.com/en/our-industrial-life/type/article/hurricane-helene-threatens-global-semiconductor-supply-chain/ https://www.aveva.com/en/our-industrial-life/type/article/hu... [2] https://www.cbs17.com/news/north-carolina-news/spruce-pine-quartz-mine-restarts-production-after-helene-hits-nc-mountains/ https://www.cbs17.com/news/north-carolina-news/spruce-pine-q...
- grosswait 6mo agoI think they are saying it isn’t so rare that it couldn’t become commoditized
- foobiekr 6mo agoI 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.
- chasil 6mo agoUkraine previously sold half the neon used in semiconductor manufacturing, between Mariupol and Odessa. https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/11/ukraine_neon_supplies/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/11/ukraine_neon_supplies...
- CamperBob2 6mo agoWhat eventually happened with the neon crunch? Those cities are still under Russian control, correct?
- chasil 6mo agoI have seen responses that conservation efforts have allowed the industry to make due with less.
- brohee 6mo agoOdesa is not and has been hit less than more Eastern cities. OTOH I'd assume Ingas in Mariupol ceased to exist for practical purposes.
- brohee 6mo agoActually, Ingas the company very much survived and moved to the Odesa region (https://ingas.ua/en/pro-nas/ https://ingas.ua/en/pro-nas/). And they still have Neon in their catalog so most likely another case of impressive Ukrainian resilience.
- littlestymaar 6mo agoThe more efficient a system is (due to specialization and removal of redundancy), the more fragile it becomes. That's why biological systems look so wasteful (chlorophyll reflecting the more abundant wavelength, etc.)
- nandomrumber 6mo agoWhat do you mean? There’s more green light from sun light at the surface of the Earth than the red or blue.
- littlestymaar 6mo agoYes, that's my point exactly: to maximize efficiency, you'd try catching this more abundant light, but plants do the opposite, chlorophyll catches other wavelength and reflect green (which is why plants appear green).
- nandomrumber 6mo agoAh, yes indeedy, obvious now. Dunno what I was thunking when I wrote that.
- mullingitover 6mo ago[flagged]
- dbspin 6mo agoBoy do you need to look in a mirror.
- cramsession 6mo agoIt's not apparent on first read but I do think he's referring to the US and Israeli governments.
- Pay08 6mo agoI'm pretty sure that's why the above comment said he needs to look in a mirror.
- cramsession 6mo agoIf he's correctly calling out our government, than he is looking in the mirror no?
- varispeed 6mo agoFunny they will blow up the world, just so they don't face the reality of Epstein files and kompromats in the archives of Moscow. Essentially cowards. and the reckoning will come anyway.
- bawolff 6mo agoThis 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. Not everything is about epstein.
- deleted 6mo ago
- a3w 6mo agoTitle 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. I hate title case.
- themafia 6mo agoICL is the 6th largest company producing Bromine. The US, China and India are also large producers. Why do I feel like every war is an opportunity to create artificial scarcity?
- adrian_b 6mo agoThere 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.
- brominebrewer 6mo agoYou're all over this comment thread spreading your speculation as fact. Semiconductor-manufacturing grade bromine (specifically anhydrous hydrogen bromide) is, in fact, made in the US.
- adrian_b 6mo agoYou may be right but it would have been nice to name the company that produces it. The USGS article pointed by others contains absolutely no information about a US producer. The parent article lists at least 3 US producers of ordinary bromine, but it claims that none of them produces semiconductor-grade pure HBr and the conclusion of the parent article is that someone should build in USA a purification plant, to avoid risks. Perhaps TFA is wrong and there exists a US supplier, though even if that were true it is unknown whether it could increase its production if a shortage happened. If you know information that contradicts the parent article, you should provide it, i.e. by naming the company. In general any company benefits when more people know what it produces, so I cannot believe that you are bound by any confidentiality constraint to not name the producer, when you know it. I have replied in many places in this thread because all the comments were wrong. This is no speculation. I have worked in semiconductor manufacturing and I know perfectly well the difference between semiconductor-grade pure substances and the ordinary chemical substances, while all those comments are wrong, by confusing these things. Nothing that I said is speculation or wrong, because I have just pointed that those comments state conclusions that do not follow from their premises. The fact that USA produces ordinary bromine is no evidence that it produces semiconductor-grade pure bromine. If you are right, that does not invalidate anything that I have said. It invalidates only the parent article, which concludes that a purification plant should be built in USA, while you say that such a plant already exists. If you are right, you should name it.
- johnwhitman 6mo ago[dead]
- Animats 6mo agoNo, there isn't likely to be a bromine shortage. 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.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-bromine.pd...
- timschmidt 6mo agoDow 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/environmental-health/Topics/DEHBio/pbbs/history https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/safety-injury-prev/environmen...
- actionfromafar 6mo agoWe clearly have too much red tape and regulation. Back to the golden age!
- timschmidt 6mo agoMy 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 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.
- deepsun 6mo agoAll 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.
- Yizahi 6mo agoI remember there war a neon chokepoint a few years back, helium chokepoint, lithium chokepoint, and probably a few more I missed in the news.
- xrd 6mo agoI really like this addendum: "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."
- TrnsltLife 6mo agoStop deadnaming the Department of War!
- commentprotocol 6mo ago[dead]
- MagicMoonlight 6mo agoWhenever 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.
- decimalenough 6mo ago> 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.)
- SecuriLayer 6mo agoGood
- lifeisstillgood 6mo agoComplete tangent but “produced at is Sodom Facility” 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 …
- Pay08 6mo agoWhy wouldn't it be used?
- lifeisstillgood 6mo agoTo be honest I thought it had been destroyed, wiped out, gone forever and no-one knows where it was. It’s not a huge issue but a bit surprised to find out during a dive into consequences of Iranian blockades
- Pay08 6mo agoI mean, a good portion of American cities are named after destroyed historical ones. Sodom the city itself doesn't exist anymore, it's a wider geographical naming AFAIK.
- omegaworks 6mo ago>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.
- Pay08 6mo agoWell, propaganda certainly works. Or botting does.
- dopa42365 6mo ago$3/kg, with an estimated 100 trillion tons in seawater. https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026.pdf One of the last things anyone is going to run out of.
- adrian_b 6mo agoTFA 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.
- gorgoiler 6mo agoIs 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?
- ted_dunning 6mo agoSorta kinda. TLDR: historical brine production and modern wetlands restoration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Salt_Ponds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Salt_Ponds
- ardline 6mo agoBeen thinking about something similar. The tricky part is always the consistency guarantees.
- latentframe 6mo agoIts 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
- jeremyjh 6mo agoTFA went to great lengths to make this point. One could say that it is the entire thesis of the article.
- FrustratedMonky 6mo agoKind of like a lot of the arguments about 'climate change'. Reality is disregarded, "we'll adapt, keep the pedal to the medal, drill drill drill". Dude, it is about the rate of change, how expensive or possible it is to adapt in the short term. If purely 'adaption' was the solution to everything, then no species would be extinct. They would have adapted.