Helene damage could negatively impact computer chip production
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The town of Spruce Pine, NC (population 2,194), is home to two of the most important mines in the world that produce “high-purity quartz used for making semiconductors, solar panels and fiber-optic cables.”
Production at the mines stopped September 26, 2024, before Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida. Helene’s devastating winds and rains pummeled western North Carolina, leaving Spruce Pine with no working roads in or out. The The main CSX rail line which parallels the North Toe River has also been “heavily damaged.”
According to the News&Observer, Helene dropped more than 2 feet of rain on Spruce Pine as of Saturday, September 28, “submerging its downtown buildings and overwhelming area roads, railways, utilities, and homes.”
The oldest ultra-pure quartz mine is owned by Sibelco, a private mineral company located in Antwerp, Belgium.
The Quartz Corp. owns the the more recent mining operation. In 2011, Norsk Mineral (Norwegian) and Imerys (French) established Quartz Corp as a joint venture after merging their quartz assets, Norwegian Crystallites in Drag and The Feldspar Corporation in the US.
The Spruce Pine quartz is so pure it forms the containers (crucibles) used to melt polysilicon, which in turn forms silicon wafers. Computer chips and solar panels are formed from those wafers.
Mother Jones explains why Spruce Pine is so special:
Spruce Pine lies along a ridge of the Appalachian Mountains that were formed when two paleocontinents collided to create a single landmass, Pangea, some 380 million years ago. The precise conditions around that collision meant few impurities mixed into the molten minerals that swirled miles beneath the surface. Now cooled and worn, the rocks around Spruce Pine has the look of a dirty snowball thanks to a combination of feldspar, mica, and quartz. When ground up, it just looks like white sand, but when isolated, the quartz is perhaps the purest in the world…
High-purity Spruce Pine quartz can sell for up to $20,000 per ton, and the waste materials from mining are pristine enough that they’re even used to fill the bunkers at the Augusta National Golf Course, home of the Master’s tournament.
The extent of the impact on chip production will depend, of course, on how long the mines remain closed or inaccessible.
[Author Ed] Conway says he believes chipmakers have stocks of ultra-pure quartz that would prevent a short-term supply chain disruption from hobbling production, but he adds that if Spruce Pine remains cut off from the rest of the world for long, it could have a big impact…
[S]olar expert Johannes Bernreuter, head of Bernreuter Research says that if a disruption went on for “more than a few weeks,” it would “pose a serious problem for the production” of silicon ingots needed in the photovoltaic, or PV, industry.
In the meantime, both companies are focused on making sure their employees are okay.
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