The Bromine Chokepoint

chromacity

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...

arjie

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.

chasil

Ukraine previously sold half the neon used in semiconductor manufacturing, between Mariupol and Odessa. https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/11/ukraine_neon_supplies...

littlestymaar

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.)

mullingitover

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.

a3w

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.

themafia

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?

Animats

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...

deepsun

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.

Yizahi

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.

xrd

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."

MagicMoonlight

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.

decimalenough

> 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.)

lifeisstillgood

Complete tangent but “produced at is Sodom Facility” 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 …

omegaworks

>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.