The Bromine Chokepoint

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.

"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."

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.

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...

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.

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?

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"?

So for some people it will run out based on that, but it will never be gone.

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?

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 current generation of drones - using cheap ICE engines from mopeds and small bikes - gets up to 2000km range.

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...

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.

TLDR: historical brine production and modern wetlands restoration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Salt_Ponds

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.

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.

There’s more green light from sun light at the surface of the Earth than the red or blue.

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...

Essentially cowards.

and the reckoning will come anyway.