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The Bromine Chokepoint

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Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#121

Post by adrian_b »

dopa42365 wrote: post #97

$3/kg, with an estimated 100 trillion tons in seawater. https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026.pdf One of the last things anyone is going to run out of.

TFA 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.

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#122

Post by mbreese »

adrian_b wrote: post #115
pfdietz wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way of making bromine is just bubbling chlorine gas through warm seawater. This oxidizes bromide ions to bromine, which bubbles out.

That 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.

> 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.

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#123

Post by adrian_b »

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…

Your comment, like most in this thread, confuses ordinary bromine with semiconductor-grade pure bromine.

The semiconductor industry does not use ordinary chemical substances, but only special semiconductor-grade pure substances, which are many orders of magnitude more pure than the so-called "pure" substances that are used elsewhere in the chemical industry.

It is absolutely irrelevant that substances like ordinary bromine and ordinary silicon are very abundant and very cheap. The semiconductor industry cannot use them and the corresponding semiconductor-grade pure substances are far more expensive and their availability is limited by the production capacities of the very few producers that exist for them around the world.

If the few existing production plants for any semiconductor-grade pure substance were destroyed, semiconductor device manufacturing would be stopped for a few years, until new purification plants are built.

TFA argues that in order to avoid such risks, there should be more purification plants in geographically-diverse locations, for instance that one such purification plant should be built in USA, where there are local producers of ordinary bromine, that would provide the raw material.

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#124

Post by adrian_b »

mbreese wrote: post #122
adrian_b wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That 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.

> 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 is exactly the conclusion of TFA, that in order to avoid such risks purification plants should also be built in other places, including in USA where the local producers of bromine can provide the raw material.

However, the construction of such a purification plant can take years, so TFA argues that it should be done ASAP, instead of waiting for some catastrophe that would destroy the existing plants, when this would be too late.

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#125

Post by brominebrewer »

adrian_b wrote: post #116
scythe wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ou…

The linked article from USGS says nothing about semiconductor-grade purity bromine, but only about ordinary bromine that is used in the chemical industry. Semiconductor-grade purity bromine is orders of magnitude more expensive than ordinary bromine and the vast majority of bromine producers do not make it. The USGS article provides no evidence that such bromine is made in USA. I would rather expect Japan to be a pro…

Semiconductor-manufacturing grade hydrogen bromide IS made in the US, and we do sell it to Korea (and Japan, and Taiwan...)

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#126

Post by brominebrewer »

adrian_b wrote: post #120
themafia wrote: post #25

ICL 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?

There 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 p…

You'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.

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#127

Post by FrustratedMonky »

nl wrote: post #102
onion2k wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given 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.

I don't believe route limitation for dangerous goods is a thing. I looked on https://www.iata.org/en/publications/newsletters/iata-knowle... Interestingly I asked both Claude and ChatGPT "does the Infectious Substances Shipping Regulations include anything about what routes for airfreight are allowed?" and it flagged it and wouldn't respond, although switching to Sonnet 4 allowed Claude to answer.

ChatGPT has gotten 'sensitive', almost unusable in last week. That seems like a simple question, and it refused. It's done same to me, on very simple generic questions. It somehow infers something much more nefarious, then refuses.

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#128

Post by FrustratedMonky »

Kind 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.

Re: The Bromine Chokepoint

#130

Post by hiddencost »

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…

Software engineer disease: citing one misunderstood statistic to refute an extensive analysis by one of the leading experts in the field.
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