Hacker News Reader

Given the need to remove all the oxygen and add several nines of additional purity regardless, that article is ringing "investor sales pitch" alarm bells for me.

Quick google suggests the USA produced about 3.6% of global silicon in 2021.

Even if this is about literally wanting quartz itself rather than as a source of silicon, IIRC most industrial uses are synthetic quartz rather than natural.

Ben's correct, the US simply isn't a significant player in the global PV supply chain. Perhaps later, but not at present.

I found this Wired article from 2018 with interesting information https://www.wired.com/story/book-excerpt-science-of-ultra-pu....

But I cannot find actual numbers to help understand how important that mine is. Are we talking about 1, 10, 50, 70+ percent of the ultra pure quarts market? From what I can see the US doesn’t seem to be a large player