The Bromine Chokepoint: How Strife Could Halt Production of World’s Memory Chips

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...

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.

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...

Ukraine previously sold half the neon used in semiconductor manufacturing, between Mariupol and Odessa.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/11/ukraine_neon_supplies...

This particular thing may or may not blow up in our faces, but as long as the US and Israel fail to take vast military power away from their corrupt despots it's only a matter of time before something seriously bad blows up.

Despots will keep pushing their limits until they get punched in the nose, and so far the only limits they've hit have been a few angry parades.

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.

I really like this addendum:

"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."

I remember there war a neon chokepoint a few years back, helium chokepoint, lithium chokepoint, and probably a few more I missed in the news.

the boomer chokepoint is far higher up the curve of strangulation

https://www.piratewires.com/p/crypto-choke-point

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?

The more efficient a system is (due to specialization and removal of redundancy), the more fragile it becomes.

That's why biological systems look so wasteful (chlorophyll reflecting the more abundant wavelength, etc.)

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.

I hate title case.

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