The Bromine Chokepoint: How Strife Could Halt Production of World’s Memory Chips
1mon 29d ago by lemmy.world/u/cosmicrookie in topview from warontherocks.com
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/1058028
South Korea sources 97.5 percent of its bromine imports from Israel. Beyond that vulnerable concentration, converting bromine into semiconductor-grade hydrogen bromide gas requires dedicated purification infrastructure, and producers outside Israel are already fully committed to existing customers and stretched too thin to absorb additional demand.
The United States should add bromine, semiconductor-grade hydrogen bromide gas, and the full range of specialty gases derived from bromine to the critical minerals list, and use Defense Production Act authority and CHIPS and Science Act funding to co-invest with allies in purification capacity on allied soil.
If ICL’s Sodom facility goes offline, the gap does not get filled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Works
The Dead Sea Works (Hebrew: מפעלי ים המלח, Mif'alei Yam HaMelakh) is an Israeli potash plant in Sodom, on the Dead Sea coast of Israel. Originally known as the Palestine Potash Concession, it operated from two sites during the Mandatory Palestine period - Kalya in the north and Sodom in the south.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromine
Elemental bromine is very reactive and thus does not occur as a free element in nature. Instead, it can be isolated from colourless soluble crystalline mineral halide salts analogous to table salt, a property it shares with the other halogens. While it is rather rare in the Earth's crust, the high solubility of the bromide ion (Br−) has caused its accumulation in the oceans. Commercially the element is easily extracted from brine evaporation ponds, mostly in the United States and Israel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea
Surface Area: 605 km² (234 sq mi) (2016)
Aight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea
The Salton Sea is a shallow, landlocked, highly saline endorheic lake in Riverside and Imperial counties in Southern California. It lies on the San Andreas Fault within the Salton Trough, which stretches to the Gulf of California in Mexico. The lake is about 15 by 35 miles (24 by 56 km) at its widest and longest. A 2023 report put the surface area at 318 square miles (823.6 km2).
That's got more area, even in its shrunken state, than the Dead Sea.
The Salton Sea geothermal brine reservoir is located at depths of approximately 1 to 3 kilometres (0.62 to 1.86 mi) below ground and contains fluids at temperatures ranging from 250 to 380 °C (482 to 716 °F). Among valuable minerals the brine contains lithium (202 ppm ± 20%, i.e. more than in the Dead Sea, which is 30–40 ppm), rubidium (110 ppm ± 47%), caesium (19.8 ppm ± 15%), bromine (91 ppm ± 31% vs 5000 ppm in the Dead Sea).[132]
Not enough brine in the long term? You want more seawater to evaporate, no sweat. We can dig a channel. It's below sea level.
https://pacinst.org/salton-sea-import-export-plans/

Want to accelerate brine concentration at less cost? Build a datacenter there and run the water from the datacenter through a heat exchanger to dump heat into an evaporation pool, and use the evaporative cooling from brine evaporation to cool the datacenter.