Comment by themafia
21 hours ago
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?
21 hours ago
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?
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.
You're all over this comment thread spreading your speculation as fact. Semiconductor-manufacturing grade bromine (specifically anhydrous hydrogen bromide) is, in fact, made in the US.
You may be right but it would have been nice to name the company that produces it.
The USGS article pointed by others contains absolutely no information about a US producer.
The parent article lists at least 3 US producers of ordinary bromine, but it claims that none of them produces semiconductor-grade pure HBr and the conclusion of the parent article is that someone should build in USA a purification plant, to avoid risks.
Perhaps TFA is wrong and there exists a US supplier, though even if that were true it is unknown whether it could increase its production if a shortage happened.
If you know information that contradicts the parent article, you should provide it, i.e. by naming the company.
In general any company benefits when more people know what it produces, so I cannot believe that you are bound by any confidentiality constraint to not name the producer, when you know it.
I have replied in many places in this thread because all the comments were wrong. This is no speculation. I have worked in semiconductor manufacturing and I know perfectly well the difference between semiconductor-grade pure substances and the ordinary chemical substances, while all those comments are wrong, by confusing these things.
Nothing that I said is speculation or wrong, because I have just pointed that those comments state conclusions that do not follow from their premises. The fact that USA produces ordinary bromine is no evidence that it produces semiconductor-grade pure bromine.
If you are right, that does not invalidate anything that I have said. It invalidates only the parent article, which concludes that a purification plant should be built in USA, while you say that such a plant already exists.
If you are right, you should name it.