Hurricane Helene Shut Down Mines Crucial to the Computer Chip Industry

And more about the human and environmental costs of renewable energy and digital technology —and how we can do better.

Hurricane Helene Shut Down Mines Crucial to the Computer Chip Industry

Downtown Spruce Pine, underwater. Photo by DiscoverSprucePineNC.com

Out in the North Carolina mountains hammered by Hurricane Helene, near the tiny town of Spruce Pine, lie two mines that produce a mineral very few people have heard about but which is critical to the entire global economy and digital ecosystem. Spruce Pine is the world’s leading source of ultra-high purity quartz, which is used to manufacture the overwhelming majority of the equipment needed to make the silicon chips that underpin all our digital devices. The area was hit with more than two feet of rain, and the floodwaters have shut down both of those mines. The repercussions may be felt around the world.

You can find the whole story of Spruce Pine in my book, The World in a Grain, but here’s a quick primer. To make silicon chips, you need to first melt down a highly-purified material called polysilicon. That can only be done in crucibles that are themselves made of a material so pure it will not react chemically with the polysilicon, and is also able to withstand enormous heat. The best material for those crucibles is ultra-pure quartz. Spruce Pine is the source of the purest natural quartz ever found on Earth. It’s estimated that 70 to 90 percent of these crucibles are made with Spruce Pine quartz. There’s an excellent chance the chip that powers whatever device you are reading this on was made using quartz from this obscure corner of Appalachia.    

The biggest Spruce Pine quartz operation is run by Belgium-based minerals giant SCR-Sibelco—and as of last week, flooding had shut down their main mine. Same with the other mine, run by The Quartz Corp, which says that “we have no visibility on when they will restart.” What’s more, the roads and railway connecting Spruce Pine to the outside world have been heavily damaged by the hurricane. Bottom line: the supply of Spruce Pine quartz is, for now, shut off.

It’s hard to say exactly what this will mean. It will not mean the imminent collapse of the world’s semiconductor industry, as some excitable social media posters have speculated.  Sibelco and its customers likely have some stockpiles stored up, and there are other mines, in Russia, Brazil, China and elsewhere that could potentially provide high quality quartz. Those new supplies, however, would take time to scale up and probably require more refining than Spruce Pine’s, which means more energy used, which makes everything more expensive. Those costs would get passed on to customers.

Fellow Substacker and author Ed Conway spoke to a former Quartz Corp exec who indicated it will lkely be several months before the mines are able to start up again. The waters have to subside, equipment will need to be repaired or replaced, and workers might not be available for some time as they struggle to deal with the damage to their homes and families. “It’s quite hard to imagine this won’t have at least some impact (might be small, might not) on the cost of silicon wafers. Does that mean semiconductors and solar panels (which also use Spruce Pine quartz) become more expensive or for that matter more scarce in the coming months? ... Very possibly,” concludes Conway. 

I apologize to any purists who might be upset that this post is about a mineral, not a metal. But the moral of the story applies to most critical metals. While the impact of Spruce Pine’s flooding on the rest of the world might be small, it’s a deeply unsettling reminder of how much modern civilization depends on a whole range of often-obscure natural resources—and how vulnerable those supplies are.

Meanwhile, the 2,200 people who live in Spruce Pine can really use some help! Power, water and cell service are still largely shut off, and as you can see in the photo above, the town was flooded. You can make a donation to help rebuild the town here.

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A Thought for Your Pennies

Reader Peter Oleson wrote me to suggest: “There are billions (if not more) of pennies stashed in jars and peoples’ drawers.  A lot of copper. The US Treasury could buy back pennies and melt them down.”

I thought that was an intriguing idea, especially considering that pennies are now effectively worthless, since hardly anybody uses them. (Here in Canada they were phased out years ago.) Disappointingly, it turns out there’s hardly any copper in the modern American one-cent piece. The original coin, first introduced in 1792, was made of solid copper, but the literal penny-pinchers at the US Mint have since downgraded it into a much cheaper disc that is 97.5% zinc, covered with a thin copper coating. Still, there a lot of pennies out there—as many as 240 billion, estimates the New York Times. Here’s how it maths out. A modern penny weighs 2.5 grams, which means it contains .0625 grams of copper. Multiply that by 240 billion, convert the grams into tons, and you get 16,534 tons of copper. That’s enough for more than 200,000 electric cars! Moral: A penny saved is no longer a penny earned—it’s just wasted copper.

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More On AI’s Appetite for Metal

Following my post on the topic sparked by her question, Alexandra Samuel and I had a little back-and-forth that I thought was interesting enough to reprise here:

Alexandra: A question I'm mulling in response to your estimates of AI's impact on metal and energy consumption: How does this impact stack up against AI-free alternatives? Because yes, a lot of AI use may constitute net new activity...but then, at least some of it displaces human work that would otherwise have gone into writing the code, drafting the article, illustrating the report, etc.

While I mostly WORRY about that displacement (because of impact on wages, employment and the social ills that stem from lower wages and employment), our reckoning of AI's environmental impact does need to factor in the environmental impact of human labor. If that coding, writing or illustration work would otherwise be undertaken by humans commuting to air-conditioned offices in gas-powered cars (or cars with metal-rich batteries), then presumably there are some energy/resource savings that come from using AI instead.

Vince: Hm, interesting point. But my guess is that while AI will certainly displace/replace much human labor, it will also lead to a huge overall increase in the production of what those humans do— writing the code, drafting the articles, etc., thereby more than cancelling out any energy savings. Jevon's Paradox, in other words.

Alexandra: I suspect you're right....but I do think it depends.

Imagine you buy a private island on which to found your own media empire. Your goal is to put out 1,000 articles a day. Say you assign one human to write one article per day. That means you need to feed and house 1,000 people working on 1,000 computers, in an air-conditioned or heated building that can hold 1,000 desks.

Alternately, you decide to teach your content farmers how to use AI to quickly generate 10 stories a day. Now you only need 100 people on Content Farm Island, instead of 1,000. Do we really think the footprint of the AI usage is going to be greater than the resource savings from cutting your island's population by 90%?

What this really comes down to is whether we continue to expand production infinitely (which means an infinite expansion in demand)...in which case yes, each human continues to produce more and more, and consume more and more energy in doing do; or whether an AI-enabled increase in productivity ultimately hits a wall in how many people we need producing (physical or virtual) goods.

The latter seems more likely, which is why it's such a worry in terms of employment and income inequality, but perhaps a mitigating factor in terms of the resource-consumption implications. We can't productivity-boost our way out of the resource consumption dilemma altogether, but we SHOULD think about how changing the model of work (by using AI) can help us create a less resource-intensive, more sustainable version of work that perhaps CAN mitigate the footprint of AI.

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PS—Power Metal, the newsletter, will be taking next week off. I’ll be busy recording the audio version of the book! Did I mention it comes out on November 19 and you can preorder it right here and now? Amazon is still offering a 10% discount!