The remnants of Hurricane Helene ripped through the Western North Carolina mountain town of Spruce Pine last week, disrupting a quartz facility integral to the global production of solar panels and semiconductor chips.

The largest Spruce Pine mine is owned by Sibelco, a private Belgium mineral company that is Mitchell County’s top employer. Sibelco told The News & Observer Monday that the company has “temporarily halted operations at the Spruce Pine facilities” since Sept. 26.

“The hurricane has caused widespread flooding, power outages, communication disruptions, and damage to critical infrastructure in the area,” the emailed statement said. “Many people in the area, including our employees and their families, are facing displacement and significant disruptions.”

As of Saturday morning, the storm had dumped more than 2 feet of rain on the town, submerging its downtown buildings and overwhelming area roads, railways, utilities, and homes.

Sibelco’s mines are north of downtown in an area called the Spruce Pine Mining District. From above, they look like giant white sandy beaches. The area is set back from the local North Toe River, which flooded.

But news reports indicate surrounding Mitchell County has experienced extensive damage to roads and rail lines, which could impact workers’ ability to get to the site and the company’s ability to transport materials.

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.”

Nowhere else matches the purity

Facility issues have hindered the global supply chain of quartz before. In 2008, a fire at a Spruce Pine quartz refinery “temporarily brought production to a halt and impacted the market,” reported Global Risk Intel, a Washington D.C.-based consulting firm.

Throughout the 20th century, local miners extracted mica and feldspar from the Mitchell County sites, yet, in the past 30 years, escalating demand for newer technologies has made high-purity quartz one of North Carolina’s most important exports. Last year, Sibelco announced it would invest $200 million into the site by 2025 to double production. The company sells its quartz under the brand name IOTA.

“I’ve been sent to Brazil, I’ve been sent to Australia, and nothing matches the final purity of the Spruce Pine quartz,” local geologist Alex Glover said during an interview last March.

More recently, a second company named The Quartz Corp has invested in mines around Spruce Pine, but it is too soon to tell how the storm will impact production, the company said.

“We are in a phase of assessing the situation and it is far too early to comment on the impact to high purity quartz production,” company spokesperson May Kristin Haugen said in an email statement to the N&O.

Compared to Sibelco’s sites, The Quartz Corp location is closer to the North Toe River, aerial images on Google Maps show.

“Our priority now is people and the families being affected by this terrible storm,” Haugen continued. “Hopefully, we can provide more information at a later stage.”

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