new york
CNN
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Hurricane Helen’s devastation in North Carolina could have serious implications for a niche but vitally important corner of the tech industry.
On the outskirts of Spruce Pine, a town of fewer than 2,200 people, the Blue Ridge Mountains are home to two of the world’s purest quartz mines, which were formed in the region some 380 million years ago. The material is a key component in the global supply chain for semiconductor chips that power everything from smartphones and cars to medical devices and solar panels.
But operations at the facility have been suspended since Hurricane Helen hit the southeastern United States over the weekend, causing historic flooding and landslides, cutting off roads and power and putting millions of residents at risk. There is.
Sibelco and The Quartz Corp., which manage the two mines separately, said they shut down operations on Sept. 26 ahead of the storm and were working to restart them. However, it is not clear how severely damaged the mine is or how long it will take to get it back up and running.
What is clear is that these facilities, like the rest of the region, face infrastructure disruptions such as flooding, power outages, road closures, and lack of phone service. And importantly, they are still trying to reach all of the local employees who make up the professional workforce, many of whom have been displaced or whose homes have been damaged.
Supply chain experts say it could be weeks before mines are up and running again, and the technology industry is struggling as Silicon Valley giants pour billions into chips to power artificial intelligence systems. Chips are in short supply and prices could rise at a particularly bad time.
“If there’s one mining complex that’s very important to the semiconductor manufacturing industry and even the solar panel industry, it’s the Sibelco mine and the Quartz Corp mine in Spruce Pine,” said Co-Director of Climate and Energy. Seaver Wang said. Program of the Environmental Research Center Breakthrough Institute.
“The level of devastation here is insane,” Spencer Bost, executive director of the economic development group Downtown Spruce Pine, told CNN on Tuesday.
“We don’t know anything about (the mining company’s) damage at this point, but the damage at Spruce Pine is so devastating that we don’t know when our employees will be able to return,” Bost said. “People are getting hurt, property is being destroyed, roads don’t exist in some places…My fiancé is a third-grade teacher, and yesterday the principal contacted her and basically said, ‘The school is gone.’ Ta.”
Sibelco, a Belgian company whose Spruce Pine mine is the county’s largest employer, said in a post on its website that it has “confirmed the safety of most of its employees and has confirmed that those who cannot be reached due to ongoing power outages and communication disruptions. “We are working hard to reach out to them.” ”
“Rest assured that Sibelco is actively cooperating with government agencies and third-party rescue and recovery efforts to mitigate the impact of this event and resume operations as soon as possible,” the company said. Ta.
Quartz, a small but important neighbor of Sibelco that is jointly owned by a French and Norwegian mineral company, called the impact of the hurricane a “dramatic situation for the region” and said it had “no outlook” on when it would be able to resume operations. “I can’t stand it,” he said. .
“We are focused on ensuring the safety of our employees and their families and are making every effort to reach those who remain unreachable. In addition to this, our team is task force to restore the most essential services and get additional supplies to Spruce Pine,” Quartz said in a statement.
Quartz is an essential material in the semiconductor manufacturing process. Also, its purity is very important to avoid chip damage.
“We’re building incredibly complex chips with potentially 100 billion transistors and 100 billion tiny machines on a chip the size of a thumbnail. If they are misaligned, they can create defects that destroy the circuit,” said Gregory Allen, director of the Center for Advanced AI Technology at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
And while quartz is plentiful around the world, ultra-pure quartz like the one mined in Spruce Pine is not. The Spruce Pine mine supplies an estimated 80% to 90% of the world’s high-purity quartz, with experts saying the exact amount is proprietary and unknown, and is being used by semiconductor manufacturing giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and others. of semiconductor manufacturers.
While some chipmakers may have up to several weeks’ worth of high-purity quartz supplies to continue production, extended mine closures will likely result in chip shortages. In some cases, refining regular quartz can be used as a substitute, but there is no ability in the world to do that refining in sufficient quantities to compensate for the loss of spruce pine.
“Major chipmakers expect there will be pauses and disruptions in their supply chains while they wait for mines to reopen,” said David Bader, director and professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Data Science Institute. .
Furthermore, even if the mines themselves are able to reopen, local infrastructure such as roads will be needed to get the product to customers.
A chip shortage could bring many industries to a standstill. For example, the 2021 global chip shortage caused by the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic meant that automakers were building near-complete cars, but powering critical functions Because there was a shortage of chips for this, shipments could not be made, which meant that car prices rose.
“More or less, most of the U.S. economy is downstream from the semiconductor industry as a critical input,” CSIS’s Allen said.
But Wang said despite the scale of spruce pine damage, there is still reason for optimism.
“This mine is considered a national strategic asset and I imagine the federal government will go through hell to get it up and running as soon as possible… No one knows that this mining complex is important. I know,” Wang said.
