No power but only minor damage: Spruce Pine quartz mine owner updates Helene recovery

The world’s main producer of high-purity quartz, a mineral crucial to the global supply of semiconductor chips, announced its shuttered Spruce Pine, North Carolina, mines have endured “minor damage,” according to an initial assessment conducted after Tropical Storm Helene upended the town.

“Our dedicated teams are on-site, conducting cleanup and repair activities to restart operations as soon as we can,” the mine owner, Sibelco, wrote in an update Friday. The private Belgian company added the power remains out at its Western North Carolina mines but that repairs have “progressed significantly.”

With around 500 employees, Sibelco is the largest employer in Mitchell County, a rural mountainous area northeast of Asheville. The company said all its employees and contractors had been accounted for following last week’s storm, which dumped more than two feet of rain on Spruce Pine and flooded the local North Toe River. Its facilities have been closed since Sept. 26.

Sibelco’s mines sit north of downtown in an area called the Spruce Pine Mining District. Like much of the region, Mitchell County has sustained extensive road and rail line damage , which could hinder employees’ ability to get to the mines and Sibelco’s ability to move its valuable quartz.

Free of impurities, Spruce Pine quartz has been crucial to the supply of semiconductor wafers, solar panels and other fast-growing technologies.

“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.”

Sibelco has grown to keep up with the demand. Between 2019 and 2023, the company increased its production of high-quality quartz by almost 60%. And in April 2023, Sibelco committed to invest $200 million in its Spruce Pine facilities to double production by next year.

On Friday, the company said its final product stock “has not been impacted” by the storm. “We are working closely with our customers to assess their needs and plan the restart of product shipments as soon as we can,” Sibelco said.

Sibelco sells its white quartz sand under the brand name IOTA, which the company states online is “indispensable in the manufacture of a wide range of high-tech products.”

Disruptions at the Spruce Pine mines have previously impacted the supply chain of quartz; In 2008, a fire at a local quartz refinery “temporarily brought production to a halt and impacted the market,” the consulting firm Global Risk Intel reported.

Sibelco isn’t the only quartz mining company in Spruce Pine. In recent years, a second company named The Quartz Corp opened area mines. On Tuesday, The Quartz Corp confirmed it had also stopped operations following Helene, noting “we have no visibility on when they will restart.”

Compared to Sibelco’s sites, The Quartz Corp mine is positioned closer to the North Toe River.