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The Bromine Chokepoint

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Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#61

Post by notnaut »

boondongle wrote: post #59
Animats wrote: post #31

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 b…

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…

Same thing that happens for people. Luck and circumstance is equivalent to merit.

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#62

Post by bitcurious »

chasil wrote: post #49
Animats wrote: post #31

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 b…

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.

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#63

Post by bitcurious »

bawolff wrote: post #26
varispeed wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny 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.

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. Not everything is about epstein.

> USA has hated iran since the revolution.

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.

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#64

Post by browsingonly »

scythe wrote: post #56
Animats wrote: post #31

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 b…

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.

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#65

Post by decimalenough »

> 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.)

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#66

Post by IgorPartola »

foobiekr wrote: post #21
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 les…

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 mee…

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.

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#67

Post by chasil »

jubilanti wrote: post #37
chromacity wrote: post #2

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 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...

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 cit…

As 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-com...

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#68

Post by trhway »

decimalenough wrote: post #65

> 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 faciliti…

>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.

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#69

Post by chasil »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #57
chasil wrote: post #6

Ukraine previously sold half the neon used in semiconductor manufacturing, between Mariupol and Odessa. https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/11/ukraine_neon_supplies...

What eventually happened with the neon crunch? Those cities are still under Russian control, correct?

I have seen responses that conservation efforts have allowed the industry to make due with less.

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#70

Post by zasz »

chromacity wrote: post #17
csnover wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> 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 worl…

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.

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