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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?
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article says it would be difficult to ramp up other production. What is your claim based on?
As far as day-to-day production goes, it’s not a terribly complicated process. I’m not going to say it’s easy, but it’s not hard (in the grand scheme of this industry). Anyways, with that out of the way: Quote me where I talked about difficulty of bringup (layperson: “ramping up”) production. (I’m assuming that that is the “claim” that you think I made that you are referring to. If it’s not, please enlighten me.) Unl…
The purification processes for any of the substances used in the semiconductor industry are quite complicated and they are done in few places around the world. For many pure substances, major suppliers are located in Germany or Japan.
The substances with a semiconductor-grade purity are much more expensive than the ordinary substances. Being one thousand times more expensive is not unusual, which demonstrates the difficulty of the purification processes.
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…
One way of making bromine is just bubbling chlorine gas through warm seawater. This oxidizes bromide ions to bromine, which bubbles out.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ou…
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 producer, not USA, because for many semiconductor-grade purity chemical substances there are major producers in Japan.
Korea does not like to depend on imports from Japan, so I would not be surprised if there was a Japanese source of pure bromine but Korea prefers to import it from Israel. If this were true, they could still switch suppliers in case of a shortage.
Its an interesting argument but the main issue may be that the bottleneck is not bromine itself but qualification and purification infrastructure. That matters because physical scarcity have very different resilience options
Whenever you see an article like this, it's important to remember that nothing ever happens. We've been promised all kinds of things, none of them have ever happened. Nothing ever happens.
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?
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.