Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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 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...

View on HN

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 country, not as a function of an economic opportunity and ramp up.

Same thing that happens for people. Luck and circumstance is equivalent to merit.

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.

https://academic.oup.com/jiel/article/26/2/233/7071723

One case study involves economic coercion.

(Disclosure: I worked with the author, although not on this paper)

Slack is a synonym for redundancy but is also a synonym for inefficiency.

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."

The production facility is a real vulnerability but the shipping factor is overstated - total supply for silicone etching could be airlifted. It’ll be more expensive but not a crisis.

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.

Given the importance of DRAM, I imagine they would get their own plane if required.

The issue isn't the plane. It's being allowed to fly over places where people live.

No better time than now to get into suborbital cargo freight business.

Boeing makes the minuteman 3, maybe now is a good time to invest.

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.

It doesn't infer anything, you just hit a blacklisted token

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

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.)

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.

TFA is about high-purity bromine, not about ordinary bromine.

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.

> Quote me where I talked about difficulty of bringup (layperson: “ramping up”) production.

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.

> IMHO that means that "spinning up a facility" is relatively easy;

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.

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.

The issue is chip production in Korea and possibly Taiwan. And that's where vast amounts of US chip inventory comes from. How to buildout AI capacity if can't source memory chips? This exposes another risk to the high AI valuations which are underpinning market valuations.

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.

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 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.

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

Your link does not provide any evidence that USA produces any bromine for the semiconductor industry.

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.

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

That sounds toxic.

Br2 is quite toxic, yes, just like Cl2.

Most industrial chemical processes should not be done at home.

Unless you're the Chemical Force YT channel. "Let's add hydrazine to liquid ozone!"

I imagine he goes through a lot of glassware.

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.

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.

That’s not the issue. Someone could build the plant domestically (US), sure. It would take time, but getting a plant build isn’t hard. But who would do that? If the plant isn’t financially stable during non-crisis situations, then it won’t get built without subsidies. A plant that can’t offer a competitive price will never be used during “normal” times, so it becomes financially untenable.

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.

Right. Commercial "high purity" bromine is 99.5% purity, and easily available at reasonable cost. Semiconductor processes want 99.9999%. Merck offers that. [1] €2500/liter from a lab supply house. Very few companies offer the post-purification.

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...

That's not what the article is talking about as a chokepoint, and it does describe US bromine production.

Great Lakes Chemicals (Chemtura) extracts 40 million pounds of bromine in Arkansas (Smackover Formation) annually. The Dead Sea (Israel) has approximately 1 billion tons still in the water. There's around 100 trillion tons in the oceans.

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

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 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...

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.

Would you mind engaging with the arguments of the article as well?

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com