North Carolina’s Spruce Pine Quartz Mine Reopens After Hurricane Helene

Operations at one of two quartz mines in western North Carolina resumed late this week after being shut down for more than two weeks following Hurricane Helene’s dumping of 2 feet of rain on the town of Spruce Pine, washing out roads and cutting power to an area with an industry critical to semiconductor manufacturing across the world.

Residents and business owners in Spruce Pine, North Carolina haul off debris and river mud from the ... [+] downtown area after Hurricane Helene on Oct. 4, 2024.

The small town of Spruce Pine—home to fewer than 2,500 residents—is the location of several rare mines that produce ultra-pure quartz for Sibelco North America, the largest employer in Mitchell County, and The Quartz Corp.

Sibelco resumed operations on Thursday at its Spruce Pine facility, the largest in the region, which had been halted since Sept. 26, when Hurricane Helene first made landfall in Florida.

Sibelco said in a press release it has restated shipments to customers and that production is ramping up to full capacity.

The company also recently announced the $1 million creation of the Sibelco Spruce Pine Foundation to provide long-term support to the area, which is expected to need months or years to recover from the devastation to infrastructure, housing and businesses.

The other mining company in Spruce Pine, The Quartz Corp, has not yet announced that operations have restarted but said last week all of its employees are safe and that it was "too early to assess" when work could resume.

Super-pure quartz, mined and produced at few facilities around the world, is used to ensure the purity of molten silicon used as the base for manufacturing semiconductor wafers, as well as for semiconductor crucibles and quartz glass products like windows, rods, and tubes.

It is possible to use less pure quartz to create the same materials, but it’s a slower and more expensive process than using the ultra-high-quality materials that Spruce Pine has "far and away" the most of, economist Ed Conway told NPR.

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“It is rare, unheard of almost, for a single site to control the global supply of a crucial material,” Conway wrote in his 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.”

In 2008, a fire in Spruce Pine forced a local quartz mine to halt production, which "all but shut off the supply of high-purity quartz to the world market, sending shivers through the industry." That fire impacted only one plant—the Unimin Corporation Quartz/Feldspar Plant, which has since been acquired by Sibelco—and its impacts were still felt industry wide. Today, demand for semiconductors is much higher than what it was in 2008 as they're used to power newer technologies like artificial intelligence and 5G connectivity.

Hurricane Helene made landfall at around 11:10 p.m. EDT on Thursday, Sept. 26 near the city of Perry in Florida’s Big Bend area as a Category 4. The storm moved through Florida and Georgia before heading north and devastating the areas of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. More than 220 people have been confirmed dead in six Southeastern states since the hurricane hit, and authorities aren’t able to ascertain how many are still missing, though White House homeland security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall said immediately after the storm it was thought to be more than 600. Almost 50,000 people are still without power in North Carolina, according to PowerOutage.US.

President Joe Biden flew over the heavily impacted area of Asheville, North Carolina, last week but he did not stop for a visit because damage to the city's roadways have made it impossible for his motorcade to gain access. Only one of the four highways into the city is currently open, "and we can’t shut it down for a motorcade," Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer told CNN.

Emerging medical devices, computers, transportations and other technologies heavily rely on semiconductors, which can both conduct and block electricity, to provide computing power. The world's reliance on semiconductors is increasingly growing as more devices—from home appliances to vehicles—are being connected to the internet and those items each rely on semiconductors to process and transmit data. The semiconductor industry is expected to see global sales of $588 billion, according to Deloitte, up 13% over 2023.

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