Ah, this week's iteration of "we're running out of sand". I'm sure one of these predictions will eventually come true, but we have articles that overstate the likelihood and consequences of running out of <some basic material> pretty much every month.
I'm not keeping track, but some of the things we ran out of include sand, helium, tellurium, tantalum, niobium, bees...
There's a difference between "sand" in the general, and sand suitable for construction purposes. There's sharp sand and soft sand, and you need sharp sand for e.g. concrete, else it will crack and rot.
There is manufactured sand, but obviously it's more expensive than good old extraction of river beds and beaches, which is scarce.
I have a sense of complacency regarding all these. There’s always The One Factory In North Carolina That Produces The Essential Ingredient and it turns out that it’s just the price optimal one and there is enough capacity around the world to substitute.
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.
Title says that "Strife" could halt production, so who Strife, a payment processor or s.th. like that? No, the word strife from the english dictionary.
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 produces semiconductor-grade pure bromine. The fact that it produces ordinary bromine is irrelevant.
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.
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.
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.
All the supply chain posts forget to consider replacements. Not for the material, but for suppliers and sites.
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.
"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."
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.
> Israel routes most trade through Mediterranean ports at Haifa and Ashdod, bypassing the Strait of Hormuz entirely.
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.)
I mean, a good portion of American cities are named after destroyed historical ones. Sodom the city itself doesn't exist anymore, it's a wider geographical naming AFAIK.
>Three levers are available, and they require action simultaneously.
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.
Is there an industrial valley anywhere in the world with expertise in silicon chip making that is also situated next to a bay-like area surrounded by brine ponds? Suggested search terms: “valley of silicon” and “bay-like area”.
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?
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
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 52.1 ms ] threadI'm not keeping track, but some of the things we ran out of include sand, helium, tellurium, tantalum, niobium, bees...
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...
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.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/11/ukraine_neon_supplies...
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.
I hate title case.
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 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...
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.
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.
"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."
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.)
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
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.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026.pdf
One of the last things anyone is going to run out of.
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?
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.