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this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
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More on gallium and its uses:
https://techiescientist.com/uses-of-gallium/
AP did not attempt to explain why all of these rare and exotic minerals and metals and compounds are used in manufacturing...
...because there a bunch of them, explaining all the reasons for using just one of them would basically be the equivalent of a crash course in applied chemistry / manufacturing / physics / engineering, and if you want to get into why these materials are used in lieu of others, well throw logistics and economics into that pile of course work as well.
AP is reporting the news, not being an industry specific journal, or a comprehensive policy impact study.
I agree with you that it was a frustrating read... but having worked as a copy editor, and having provided many different executive reports to various businesses and non profits, I also sympathize with the writer.
This is the kind of topic where you can either do a broad level overview, or you can write a tome for those who really want to dive into all the details to fully understand it... there's no effective way to do a middling approach on such a vast and complex topic.
Fair enough, that makes sense.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1445285/gallium-share-of-production-worldwide-by-country/
As of 2022, China basically produces all (98.4%) of the world's gallium.
... Statista has much more great info, but unless you want to pay for a subscription or spend a day hopping through proxy IPs... yeah, good luck.
The previous article says: "The largest global producers of gallium are Russia, Germany, Australia, and France. "
Ok, looking at this: https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/energie/china-seltene-metalle-100.html
I can see that the reason China became this huge producer is because everyone else decided to stop and by from them instead, though that doesn't mean they can only rely on China for it.
But indeed it is now the largest gallium and germanium producer.
And Gallium is combined to make late-factorio stuff, so him who controls the Gallium, controls the future.
That's how we're saying 'high-tech' now?
...fine, I dig it
They produce 98% percent of low-purity Gallium. We produce plenty of high purity Gallium, and Gallium, like Germanium, comes from Zinc mining. Which we still do plenty of in the US. So if we need more high quality Gallium, it's not going to be hard to get.
Ah, so it's not a matter of "that's where the gallium is", it's "might as well buy it from China if they're sellin' it", same as the dollar store
Edit: I wouldn't be surprised if the places in the US producing high-quality gallium are using poor-quality Chinese gallium as feedstock though.
They are, but we have plenty of Zinc mining we can get it from ourselves. It's just an economics matter, so we'd subsidize that. We only use enough to fill one truck load per year. So it's likely we'd just get a defense contractor to do it and subsidize it
I will add that this isn't really that huge of a deal:
https://cybernews.com/editorial/gallium-germanium-semiconductor-alternatives/
The US and any other developed country can produce it, they just choose not to since the demand isn't that economical to go out of your way to mass produce:
(From the article I linked)
Not enough for a business to specialize in the material. But, seeing as the US does produce a lot of zinc and aluminum and it can be refined as a byproduct of those materials, I won't be surprised if a company steps up to fill the gap after awhile.
Really, just read the article I linked. It gives a good rundown on all this plus the germanium. Ultimately, this isn't that big of a deal for the US.
That article isn't great in the way that it considers GaAs wafers separately, as if Chinese export controls won't touch GaAs wafers, whereas the Chinese announcement specifies anything that might be used by the US military industrial complex containing Ga may be targeted.
It doesn't consider them separately, the article I linked specifically mentions that the GaAs wafers would be impacted and presents a bigger impact. That doesn't take away the core point that China is the main producer because it's not that profitable. Other countries, including the US, can easily step in and begin refining Ga and Ge as necessary.
If it became an issue we would over pay Raytheon to refine it.
In my personal experience, even wholly within a professional domain when an expert is trying to give an overview to non-experts (for example to mid-level managers for the purpose of decision making) a lot of things end up having to be axioms (i.e. "trust me this is how it works/this is what's needed/this is how its done" as fully trying to explained things to them would requires explanations of the explanations of the explanations.
This is with same-industry expert-domain-adjacent professionals, so I can see how much worse it would be when explaining stuff to average whose understanding of an industry is zero.