One way of making bromine is just bubbling chlorine gas through warm seawater. This oxidizes bromide ions to bromine, which bubbles out.
Bromine with a semiconductor-grade purity, like any other chemical substance that may be used in semiconductor device manufacturing, must pass through a very long and energy-consuming purification process, which can be done in few places besides that from Israel that is mentioned in TFA.
At the moment. We could purify bromine gas anywhere and extraction and purification don’t need to be co-located. But at the moment, the purification and extraction in Israel are co-located, which is why this is more of an immediate risk than a long term one. However, it does take time to get new production online and no one will spend the capital to build a new purification facility that will go unused after the conflict is over.
However, the construction of such a purification plant can take years, so TFA argues that it should be done ASAP, instead of waiting for some catastrophe that would destroy the existing plants, when this would be too late.
We had the same issue with PPE manufacturing during Covid. We lack production capacity locally (US) because it’s normally cheaper to source from outside suppliers. When we try to build that capacity locally, it fails in the marketplace as soon as the crisis is over and the company is left with an expensive unused factory.
The hard part isn’t building a new plant. It is the commitment to ongoing support for maintaining a diverse supply chain that is more robust to geopolitical disruptions. We are not good at factoring risk into pricing, so we only accept the cheapest prices, to the detriment of a robust supply chain.
But access to the Dead Sea is a non-issue.
[1] https://www.merckmillipore.com/UY/en/product/mm/101947
[2] https://www.lms-lab.de/en/bromine-99-9999-suprapur-250-ml/12...
I imagine he goes through a lot of glassware.