The Bromine Chokepoint
warontherocks.com
warontherocks.com
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 bromine for pool chemicals and fracking fluids will be affected long before the semiconductor industry.
[1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-bromine.pd...
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 supplements. They were bagged similarly, and PBBs were accidentally shipped into the food supply. Which led to the largest livestock culling in US history at the time. https://www.michigan.gov/mdhhs/safety-injury-prev/environmen...
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.
"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."
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.
This is what govt is good for, in respects to ensuring materials supply continuity for their domestic markets
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.)
Unless you can quote me, you’re just coming up with something in your head and arguing with me about it. In fact, in my post, I made some light allusions to the not-insubstantial cost of a bringup.
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.
In your GGP comment you wrote, "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."
IMHO that means that "spinning up a facility" is relatively easy; the reason it doesn't happen is ROI.
Well it's not, and I never said it was. So, you're reading into things that aren't there, sorry.
> the reason it doesn't happen is ROI
Yes, that's what I said. You are making up disagreements in your head when we are aligned.
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.
The article is timely as it suggests yet another unconsidered risk factor of this war - USA could destroy its own stock market. Or Iran could accelerate that with one missile. I like to think the US military know this hence obsession with missile destruction but it is reasonable based on recent behaviour to assume that the MAGA overlords can't even spell bromine nevermind understand the risk.
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.
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 country, not as a function of an economic opportunity and ramp up.
One case study involves economic coercion.
(Disclosure: I worked with the author, although not on this paper)
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.
I imagine he goes through a lot of glassware.
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.
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.
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.
We had the same issue with PPE manufacturing during Covid. We lack production capacity locally (US) because it’s normally cheaper to source from outside suppliers. When we try to build that capacity locally, it fails in the marketplace as soon as the crisis is over and the company is left with an expensive unused factory.
The hard part isn’t building a new plant. It is the commitment to ongoing support for maintaining a diverse supply chain that is more robust to geopolitical disruptions. We are not good at factoring risk into pricing, so we only accept the cheapest prices, to the detriment of a robust supply chain.
But access to the Dead Sea is a non-issue.
[1] https://www.merckmillipore.com/UY/en/product/mm/101947
[2] https://www.lms-lab.de/en/bromine-99-9999-suprapur-250-ml/12...
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.
I'm not keeping track, but some of the things we ran out of include sand, helium, tellurium, tantalum, niobium, bees...
The main reason being: materials are cheap - plant time is what's expensive.
First, raw materials are such a small fraction of chip costs that even if the market price of a given material spikes up two orders of magnitude briefly, the market can eat the spike. For many broadly used materials, this alone is "end of story" - the majority of consumers will balk at the price and exit the market long before semiconductors supply chains will. And second, between the costs of halting production and the low volumes of actual materials involved, supply buffers exist on sites. That plays against supply chain fragility.
It's one thing to have everything JITted within an inch of its life on a razor thin margins car plant. It's another matter entirely to have a "potential supply disruption" in semiconductor manufacturing that will, if all supply truly and fully stopped tomorrow, convert to actual stopped plants in 4 months unless something is done about it in the meanwhile. And that "unless something is done" bites hard when you have a lot of engineering capability underlined by general price insensitivity. As semiconductor industry does.
This dismissive contrarian Pollyanna attitude might serve well to minimise your personal anxiety, but I do not see how what you are saying is in any way the correct approach for making decisions or managing risk.
This is not some article saying that the sky is falling without evidence. It is not even an article saying the sky is falling with evidence. It is an article that says that there is a significant risk, due to an entirely preventable man-made problem, where steps can be taken now to reduce the medium-term impact of the problem. And then it lists those steps. Why is this not OK to you?
This is literally the thesis of each and every one of these articles. Only one mine in the world can produce sand for semiconductors, etc. It makes the arguments incredibly persuasive and the predictions almost always wrong.
In reality... I'd wager that the semiconductor industry uses very little bromine compared to say, plastics; and that it can be recycled or sourced from other places with minimal technological investment (e.g., as a simple byproduct of salt production in the US).
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.
Of course any of these problems can be solved in a long time, 5-10 years.
The article is talking about the problems of between potentially supply being shut off tomorrow and being fixed in "a long time". Not good times.
Israel’s enemies have been launching missiles in to Israel for decades.
Why is only now a problem?
All are different here.
Yes, Hamas and Hezbollah are the IRGC's remote occupying armies in the adjacent territories of Gaza and Lebanon, and they have launched rockets into Israel on a near-daily basis for years.
The difference is Ham/Hez rockets are small, unguided, generally aimed at residential or commercial areas to cause disruption, and are generally low-intensity and are routinely intercepted.
The differences are:
1) The attacks from Iran are large warheads on intermediate range ballistic missiles, with precision targeting.
2) They are fired in coordinated barrages along with drones and other rockets specifically intended to over-saturate the Israeli missile defenses.
3) The attacks are also targeted specifically at industrial infrastructure with the intent of causing maximal damage to the world economy.
4) The targeting uses high-precision satellite data and intelligence from Russia and China to cause maximum global damage.
Those are major differences in both quality and quantity of the attacks.
Before, the risk was relatively low: not targeting this type of industrial site, not using high-intelligence and high-precision targeting, not saturating, and using small warheads unlikely to cause major damage.
The situation since 28-Feb-2026 is entirely different.
It’s not like the location of US bases in the area is a secret.
If Iran wanted to use those hypersonics in an act of defence they would target military installations only.
We can then safely assume that those intermediate range ballistic missiles have been used for their intended purpose: the intentional destruction of industrial and residential areas in Israel and industrial targets of US allies in the area.
The probability that those missiles would be used on those targets was always unity.
Yup
In your assessment, unity.
In my assessment well above 80%, certainly so much that they IRGC missile program should have been dealt with decades ago.
But in the assessment of the rest of the market, both the stock market and the industry planning 'market', the probability was in single digits. Likely in no small part due to normalcy bias. If it had been any higher, they would have made backup and recovery plans already.
Of course, I think the US should have been making a stockpile of replacement power grid transformers, and requiring every house to have 1kW of solar power decades ago. But they don't.
It is the new situation in consideration of their lack of insight into the probabilities and planning that makes it different, no? Just because you an I can foresee a problem, doesn't mean everyone can, or will do anything about it. So now, if that target is not defended, the backup plan is years away instead of already running. Worse yet, if the backup plan was already running, targeting that production facility would be near-pointless...
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.
What decisions or risk management can I reasonably take to mitigate the Bromine chokepoint? Or most of these deep pipeline logistics issues?
Try to plan purchase with more lead time, look for alternatives beyond the original sales market, accept alternatives with less than originally desired specs or accept more than desired price?
When are those not prudent anyway?
I can't make a bromide conversion plant, and my influence on governments is minimal.
We went from supply chain shocks due to COVID, to a sift landing, to inflation, to supply chain instability due to tariffs, to petrochemical instability due to stupidity and ego. Plus the delusion that AI is going to fix everything Real Soon Now.
I don’t know how businesses make rational long range plans when the major actors are operating far from rational.
The US willingly jump into the Short Victorious trap without planning. We retired our Minesweepers, four of 11 carries are in process for repair, refurbishing, and refueling. Our allies are fine with letting us clean up our mess. And our diplomatic strategy seems to be Because we said so.
So when the big things are being handled this badly, I’m sure plenty of little things are ready to bite us in the ass.
Then the title "Could Halt Production of the World’s Memory Chips" is a lie.
It only seems like nothing happens if you stop paying attention.
The article cites "multiple occasions" in which Iranian missiles got through and hit the Negev region. Follow the link and that's two incidents almost a month ago, when Iran tried to hit the nuclear research facility. They hit one town 35km north and another 20km to the west. Those are the only strikes the article cites in the area. That was in the early days of the war, when Iran was firing their most precise missiles, in direct response to US-Israeli attacks on Iran's Natanz nuclear facility and still...
The ICL bromine facility is another 25km to the west of that town, or 40km from the nuclear research facility. There's not a lot of industrial or residential in the area. If they manage to hit anything, it'll almost certainly be the evaporation pools.
Okay but then "The mechanism of disruption does not require a direct hit on an ICL facility" but then that paragraph is the most circumstantial. The mechanism is insurance rates, which apply for any ship that docks at an Israeli port? How are those going to go up any more than they already are with a near miss, and if so, how is that not just standard above-average wartime inflation? How are the ships with the bromine not going to get to South Korea via the Mediterranean if insurance rates rise?
But really what's the likelihood that Iran is going to fire off whatever of its remaining stocks of still very imprecise missiles are left, to try to hit a needle in a haystack target with nothing else around for collateral damage?
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...
I guess not.
So for some people it will run out based on that, but it will never be gone.
How many of us thought "hmm I wonder what the next one of these is, and how do I invest"?
There is manufactured sand, but obviously it's more expensive than good old extraction of river beds and beaches, which is scarce.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140705163239/http://na.unep.ne...
"Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress."
Everything from Peak Oil to today has the globalized market/trade machine meeting the needs continuously with only leaf nodes for products being the constraint. Almost all inputs have been commoditized.
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 less damage than initially feared and was made operational within a week or two [2], not because high-purity quartz is commoditized.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2024/09/30/nx-s1-5133462/hurricane-helen...
[1] https://www.aveva.com/en/our-industrial-life/type/article/hu...
[2] https://www.cbs17.com/news/north-carolina-news/spruce-pine-q...
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 meets the real world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromine#Occurrence_and_product...
The largest producer outside the Dead Sea is China by far, and the only other significant producer is Japan (!) which produces a paltry ~10% of worldwide output. It's possible to produce bromine from other places but you'd basically be starting from zero on the infrastructure involved. The short-term risks are real.
https://www.reportlinker.com/dataset/6b01d1a976f7ec9db71e35b...
However, it may be hard for Iran to disrupt bromine production. They may also not think about it.
EDIT: According to other links in this thread the US produces a significant but undisclosed (?!) quantity of bromine, practically all of which is consumed domestically. So it was probably missing from my data. Not great for other bromine users.
At least they wouldn't have until they read this article. Come on guys.
Loose lips sink chips!
You can’t have slack in a system and be efficient, because it would be more efficient to use up all 100% of the (cheapest) capacity.
There is a fundamental tradeoff between the two that capitalists chasing 1% margins discover only when there is a disaster somewhere.
If you have one event with a 10% chance of throwing off the world’s semiconductors, that’s incredibly dangerous and worth talking about. If you have five such things (the quartz mine, bromine conversion, helium supply, etc.), there is a 60% chance that none of those events land.
Even still, it’s worth raising alarm about each and every one of them, because a single failure causes so much collateral damage. But people assume if something didn’t happen, it wasn’t worth prepping for.
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.)
the current generation of drones - using cheap ICE engines from mopeds and small bikes - gets up to 2000km range.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/11/ukraine_neon_supplies...
And they still have Neon in their catalog so most likely another case of impressive Ukrainian resilience.
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.
The USGS article pointed by others contains absolutely no information about a US producer.
The parent article lists at least 3 US producers of ordinary bromine, but it claims that none of them produces semiconductor-grade pure HBr and the conclusion of the parent article is that someone should build in USA a purification plant, to avoid risks.
Perhaps TFA is wrong and there exists a US supplier, though even if that were true it is unknown whether it could increase its production if a shortage happened.
If you know information that contradicts the parent article, you should provide it, i.e. by naming the company.
In general any company benefits when more people know what it produces, so I cannot believe that you are bound by any confidentiality constraint to not name the producer, when you know it.
I have replied in many places in this thread because all the comments were wrong. This is no speculation. I have worked in semiconductor manufacturing and I know perfectly well the difference between semiconductor-grade pure substances and the ordinary chemical substances, while all those comments are wrong, by confusing these things.
Nothing that I said is speculation or wrong, because I have just pointed that those comments state conclusions that do not follow from their premises. The fact that USA produces ordinary bromine is no evidence that it produces semiconductor-grade pure bromine.
If you are right, that does not invalidate anything that I have said. It invalidates only the parent article, which concludes that a purification plant should be built in USA, while you say that such a plant already exists.
If you are right, you should name it.
Albemarle domestically produces high purity anhydrous hydrogen bromide.
Same thing happened with oil in 70s -- everyone was sure that oil is going to end. But as with lithium I'm pretty sure the world would find another place to source bromine.
The article fails to mention the fourth lever: cessation of hostilities, recognition of Iranian sovereignty, reparations for the displaced peoples of the region and curtailment of Israeli expansionist ambitions.
If achieved, none of the collosal amounts of capital expenditure and effort required to immediately secure redundant alternatives to the Bromine supply chain would need to be exerted.
Joking aside, is this what those brine ponds were for — the ones you see from the air on approach to SFO — or were they just for regular sea salt?
TLDR: historical brine production and modern wetlands restoration.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026.pdf
One of the last things anyone is going to run out of.
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.
That's why biological systems look so wasteful (chlorophyll reflecting the more abundant wavelength, etc.)
There’s more green light from sun light at the surface of the Earth than the red or blue.
Wait what?
Really - “ At ICL’s Sdom facility, the Dead Sea brines…”
I always assumed it was gone for good … weird. I did not know that name was still in use …
It’s not a huge issue but a bit surprised to find out during a dive into consequences of Iranian blockades
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.
I hate title case.