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The Bromine Chokepoint

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Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#71

Post by actionfromafar »

timschmidt wrote: post #34
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…

Dow 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 suppleme…

We clearly have too much red tape and regulation. Back to the golden age!

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#72

Post by refurb »

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…

You’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.

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#74

Post by timschmidt »

actionfromafar wrote: post #71
timschmidt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dow 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 suppleme…

We clearly have too much red tape and regulation. Back to the golden age!

My 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 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.

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#76

Post by karlgkk »

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."

Making it isn’t hard. The issue is that it’s such a low margin product that anyone spinning up a facility will not see any decent ROI. And local govt won’t allow competition because it risks collapsing their whole market if both producers fail at a the same time.

This is what govt is good for, in respects to ensuring materials supply continuity for their domestic markets

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#77

Post by scythe »

browsingonly wrote: post #64
scythe wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I 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.

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#78

Post by dialogbox »

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…

> 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.

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#80

Post by aidenn0 »

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…

I'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.
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