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No, 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
by Animats 6mo ago
No, 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.
- mmooss 6mo agoThat's not what the article is talking about as a chokepoint, and it does describe US bromine production.
- chasil 6mo agoThe 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."
- bitcurious 6mo agoThe 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.
- onion2k 6mo agoGiven 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.
- quailfarmer 6mo agoGiven the importance of DRAM, I imagine they would get their own plane if required.
- scythe 6mo agoThe 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.
- browsingonly 6mo agoUntil 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.
- scythe 6mo agoI 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.
- zoom6628 6mo agoThe 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.
- boondongle 6mo agoPart 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.
- notnaut 6mo agoSame thing that happens for people. Luck and circumstance is equivalent to merit.
- aidenn0 6mo agoI'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.
- nl 6mo agohttps://academic.oup.com/jiel/article/26/2/233/7071723 https://academic.oup.com/jiel/article/26/2/233/7071723 One case study involves economic coercion. (Disclosure: I worked with the author, although not on this paper)
- kingstnap 6mo agoSlack is a synonym for redundancy but is also a synonym for inefficiency.
- dialogbox 6mo ago> If the price goes up ... 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.
- pfdietz 6mo agoOne way of making bromine is just bubbling chlorine gas through warm seawater. This oxidizes bromide ions to bromine, which bubbles out.
- dd36 6mo agoThat sounds toxic.
- adrian_b 6mo agoThat 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.
- mbreese 6mo ago> which can be done in few places 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.
- cess11 6mo agoWould you mind engaging with the arguments of the article as well?
- adrian_b 6mo agoYour 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.
- hiddencost 6mo agoSoftware engineer disease: citing one misunderstood statistic to refute an extensive analysis by one of the leading experts in the field.
- FuriouslyAdrift 6mo agoGreat Lakes Chemicals (Chemtura) extracts 40 million pounds of bromine in Arkansas (Smackover Formation) annually. The Dead Sea (Israel) has approximately 1 billion tons still in the water. There's around 100 trillion tons in the oceans.