Who knew a quartz mine in a tiny North Carolina town could cripple the global production of solar panels and semiconductor chips? They have a whopping 2,200 residents there. Wild.
The town is home to the purest quartz on the planet, a byproduct of continental formations that occurred more than 380 million years ago. High-purity quartz is essential to making the silicon wafers that get cut into chips. While there are other sources of quartz, the purity many producers demand is only found around the mines of Spruce Pine.
"It is rare, unheard of almost, for a single site to control the global supply of a crucial material,” wrote Ed Conway in his 2023 book “Material World.” “Yet if you want to get high-purity quartz — the kind you need to make those crucibles without which you can’t make silicon wafers — it has to come from Spruce Pine.
https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/business/article293265924.html
#semiconductors #solar #technology #quartz #mining
svoboda / Svoboda
npub1eu…6cndk
2024-10-01 03:25:52
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2024-10-01 03:25:52Event JSON
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