PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.
Anisa Khalifa: If you check out a map of Western North Carolina, you'll find spruce pine tucked right in between Boone and Asheville. But talk to folks who live in this small mountain town and you'll likely hear another name for it.
Alan Schabilion: The Mineral City. That's a moniker that's been there on on the town for a long time.
Anisa Khalifa: Spruce Pine, AKA mineral city is home to a huge variety of gems and earthly elements.
Alan Schabilion: Absolutely emeralds and rubies and sapphires.
Anisa Khalifa: But there's one mineral that's made Spruce pine known across the world, quartz.
Alan Schabilion: We have mountains made out of it,
Anisa Khalifa: and in these mountains, it's not just any kind of quartz. The stuff found here is super pure and extremely valuable.
Ed Conway: The single biggest source of ultra high purity quartz in the world is Spruce Pine.
Anisa Khalifa: And it turns out this natural mineral is vital for our entire digital ecosystem.
Ed Conway: Pretty much any computer chip in the world will have been in contact with spruce pine ports.
Anisa Khalifa: I'm Anisa Khalifa. This is the broad side where we tell stories from our home at the crossroads of the South.
This week, mineral city. And the rock that runs the world.
The minerals found around spruce pine are old. I mean, like dinosaur old.
Alan Schabilion: These rocks here are very, very old, uh, touching on about 380 million years old. So there's a lot of history here, and if you focus on it, uh, you can kind of get in tune with it.
Anisa Khalifa: This is Alan Schabilion. He's lived with his family in Spruce Pine for more than 40 years.
He's a business owner and a proud rock hound.
Alan Schabilion: A rock hound is a person that when walking around talking to people, stoops down and picks up a pretty rock. I'm a rock hound. I'm not a geologist. But I'm a rock count and I enjoy the gems and minerals as much as any geologist.
Anisa Khalifa: Alan's the owner of Emerald Village, a gem and mining tourist attraction that features 12 old mines that are open to the public.
They give underground tours where people can see different tools and pieces of equipment, and they even give folks a chance to do some digging of their own.
Alan Schabilion: That's the most popular thing here, that to come here with the thrill of discovery and go home with a, a real gemstone. Now, it may not be a real valuable one, but you never know.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Yeah, and that's the thrill of it, right? Ab Absolutely.
Alan Schabilion: Yeah.
Anisa Khalifa: That's our producer, Charlie Shelton Ormond. He caught up with Alan to talk about Spruce Pine's mineral abundance.
Alan Schabilion: And it's kind of an addicting thing to be out. I always picked it up. Rocks. Putting 'em in your pocket. Taking 'em home.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Yeah. And I've also heard that pieces of spruce pine can be found around the world.
Alan Schabilion: In fact, I see a piece in my computer right now. No, I don't see it, but every computer in the world uses quartz from this area in the production of the Silicon chips. And so without their mining in this area, we'd be still writing on clay tablets, maybe.
Anisa Khalifa: Now that might be a bit of an exaggeration. We've come a long way from clay tablets, but these courts are definitely one of a kind.
Ed Conway: It's such a, you know, unusual set of geological circumstances that nowhere else in the world has as much of this quartz being found.
Anisa Khalifa: Ed Conway is an economic journalist. He's also the author of the book Material World, the Six Raw Minerals That Shape Modern Civilization. Ed says there's two things about Quartz and Spruce Pine that set it apart.
First, there's a lot of it.
Ed Conway: I think it's got enough for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Anisa Khalifa: In fact, the deposit in Western North Carolina is so abundant that they use some of it to construct hazards at high-end golf courses.
Ed Conway: The place you'll probably have seen spruce pine ports before is the sand traps at Augusta National.
Golf course, uh, which are incredibly white. And, and that's mostly, that's sand from spruce pine 'cause it's really white, really pure sports.
Anisa Khalifa: But that's not even the top tier stuff. Which leads us to the second reason why spruce pine quartz is special. It's purity is off the charts and really pure quartz has another function that's much more important than filling a sand trap.
It helps make silicon chips for pretty much every computer in the world,
Ed Conway: not just for chips that are made in America. It goes to chips made in South Korea, solar panels made in China even. It all depends on spruce pine.
Anisa Khalifa: So how's it all work? How does a piece of Spruce pine shape what's in our iPhones? Ed helped break it down.
Ed Conway: It's not like the silicon chip that eventually ends up on your smartphone is made of spruce pine quartz.
Anisa Khalifa: No, that material comes from somewhere else, but in order for the silicon to be formed into a wafer that's refined enough to help run a computer, it first needs to be melted down inside a crucible.
Ed Conway: And then reformed into something that has complete atomic perfection. And in order for that to work, you need a crucible that is made of or lined. With Ultrahigh purity Quartz, and the single biggest source of ultrahigh purity quartz in the world is Spruce Pine. And so pretty much any computer chip in the world in the process of turning it into a silicon wafer.
So in the process of it being turned from a rock into something perfect, it will have encountered it will have been in contact with Spruce Pine, BS.
Alan Schabilion: There's, there's some good stuff found up here.
Anisa Khalifa: The quartz found in Spruce Pine might be its biggest claim to fame, but for locals like Alan Jibilian Mining is a foundation for the community and goes beyond just one mineral.
Alan Schabilion: Everybody knows people that work in the mines around here. The mines are the largest employer in the area.
Anisa Khalifa: That's been the case for a long time. The region's commercial mines have been powering the local economy and supplying the world with minerals from MICA to Kalin since the mid 18 hundreds, and they've become known for being very good at what they do. Those trade secrets are part of the reason why Spruce Pine is the global capital for mining quartz.
Today there are two quartz mines in the area. Each run by companies based in Europe. One of them Belco, took over their mine back in the 1970s and they've developed something of a reputation.
Alan Schabilion: It is quite secretive. So mining companies are not gonna let you into their labs. So you can see how they refine it, how they do what they do to.
Ed Conway: These people who run these mines are incredibly secretive. They don't, they don't ever let people in and they're secretive because like if you ran some of the most single, most important sites in the world where you have basically a monopoly on, on this incredibly important mineral, there's not all that much incentive to, to let nosy journalists like me in, which I guess is fair enough, but I'd love to see it.
Anisa Khalifa: Spruce pine's, ultrapure quartz are unique. But it's not the only place where the precious mineral is found. It's actually scattered across the world. It's in Brazil, Australia, China, but right now nowhere. But spruce Pine can mine what's needed to make those crucibles. And Ed Conway says that's something of a double-edged sword.
Ed Conway: There's basically a single strata of rock that comes out of the the ground in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. And I find that kind of both amazing, but also like terrifying at the same time. We put a lot of our eggs into like one basket and that that feels like it's pretty important.
Anisa Khalifa: So what if something were to happen to that basket?
Like, let's say a hurricane and a thousand year flood
Unidentified Anchor: from the mountains to the metro. The storm bringing heavy rains and forcing winds up to 50 miles per hour. We're already seeing that massive flooding. Sadly, the storm already
Anisa Khalifa: turns in. That's coming up after a short break.
Hi, it's Anisa with a special announcement and a small request. The broad side is coming up on our 100th episode and to mark the occasion. We're gonna do something a little different, a mailbag special. Do you have a question about North Carolina that you just haven't been able to find the answer to? Is there some offbeat local lore you'd love to know the backstory for?
Send us your question, an email or voice note form to broadside@wunc.org and we'll answer it on the show.
When Ed Conway was doing research for his book Material World, he learned something pretty wild about the quartz in Spruce Pine. Something that really hammered home how crucial these mines are.
Ed Conway: One of the things that someone said to me who used to to work in one of these mines is if someone flew over spruce pine with a, with a crop duster, with a particular chemical in it.
He told me what the chemical is, but said, don't print this. Um, and then scattered this onto the mine. Then you would shut down global chip production in a matter of months because suddenly you wouldn't have the quartz. You'd have none of the crucibles, and therefore people couldn't make the silicon wafers, which is terrifying, obviously.
Anisa Khalifa: That's crazy.
Ed Conway: Yeah.
Anisa Khalifa: For Ed, this points to a bigger issue and some scary kinks in the supply chain.
Ed Conway: Pinch points in the complex global economy that that often are overlooked. Well, this is like one of the most important pinch points, if not the most important pinch points certainly that I've ever come across, which is that global.
Computer production basically all depends. Right now, at least on a single mine, it's actually split into two. There's two companies mining it, but it's basically a single place.
Anisa Khalifa: Mm. And what you get on your book is we should be more aware of these pinch points. Right. And more generally aware of like if we buy a new smartphone, that's only possible because people are mining in Spruce Pine.
Ed Conway: Yeah. You know, if we need staff, you order it and it, it will arrive on your doorstep. And that we don't need to spend all that much time thinking about how it gets there. The market just provides it. Uh, and most of the time it does, but every so often it, it doesn't, and every so often, um, we find ourselves facing some sort of a crisis and often times it's, it's a crisis that comes because.
A particular mineral or product or in sometimes the service, suddenly something goes wrong and everyone then realizes, oh my God, we were just dependent on that one particular place for all of this stuff.
Anisa Khalifa: For Spruce Pine, that crisis came in the fall of 2024. With Hurricane Helene, the storm shut down the court's minds causing a worldwide panic lot
Unidentified Anchor: hanging in the balance.
The devastation left by Hurricane Helene threatens to upend the world semiconductor industry, pretty much every semiconductor that's out there. So it was a vulnerability that was known beforehand. Before it was sort of a hypothetical. Now it's a real question of what happens if they can't start to get this quats out.
Ed Conway: It took down production for a few weeks, really, but that was far shorter. I think there was a moment during that period where people were worried that it was gonna be down for, for months and months. And so that was one of those moments where people kind of looked into the abyss of thinking, gosh, what is this stuff I'd never heard of?
You know, high purity quartz, why does it matter? And then the mind got back up and running, and now I guess life has returned to normal and people are no longer thinking about it. And I imagine. Uh, until the next crisis, whatever that crisis might be, I imagine things will continue that way.
Anisa Khalifa: Could you speak at all to the trade wars and the Trump administration kind of zeroing in on rare minerals And moments ago,
Donald Trump: I also signed an executive order to dramatically increase production of critical minerals and rare earths. It's a big thing in this country, and as you know, we're,
Anisa Khalifa: they're right now, they're sort of looking to invest more in the rare mineral industry in the us.
Do you think that Spruce Pine has any role to play in this increased investment?
Ed Conway: Well, I think Spruce Pine is, is actually kind of a rare example of an important, uh, material that America has a near monopoly over. There aren't many of those. The vast majority of mining of minerals now happens in other countries.
So although America had a lot of stuff in the ground, the vast majority of stuff, raw materials comes from kind of all over the place. And that's just the way that we've arranged the world in over decades.
Unidentified Anchor: Us and Chinese officials met in London last week agreeing on a framework for trade negotiations to continue at the center of the agreements rare earth minerals.
We'll discuss this in more,
Ed Conway: and most rare earths are processed in China, and so the world is dependent on China for rare earth because kind of no one else wanted to do it, if that's shifting. Okay? And if America wants to, to produce more of this stuff, there is no physical like geological reason why it couldn't do much more of this stuff.
A, it's gonna take a long time. And B, if you are gonna do it through tariffs and through trying to set up more mines in America, it does mean that everything is gonna be a bit more expensive. Uh, it's just, that's the nature. The stuff is cheap right now 'cause it's in China and they're kind of lower environmental standards.
But even so, it's cheap and people like things being cheap and you know, I understand there's a lot of contention over the debate on tariffs, but there is a more fundamental kind of. Truth underneath this, which is that we have arranged the global economy in a way over the last few decades that has enabled everything to just be as cheap as possible and for us to be relatively agnostic about where it comes from.
And if that's changing, then that will have some profound consequences for how cheap everything is. Um, but that is the conversation that we ought to be having in the coming years
Anisa Khalifa: and ultimately. Ed hopes that conversation might lead to a reexamination of our relationship with the material world.
Ed Conway: A hundred years ago, 200 years ago, many of us would've been working in mining or would've had family that were working in mining, and so we'd have a, a direct connection.
We would understand when we picked up an object or ordered an object from online, he would understand physically. What it took to get that object outta the ground and get it to you, and I think you would respect it more as a result. These days we live in a kind of consumerist society where we're almost encouraged not to think about the journey things have been on before they come to us.
And as a result, I just don't think we respect them as much as we do, and so we, we dispose of them much more readily than we would otherwise. I think
Anisa Khalifa: back in Spruce Pine, Alan Bilion shares at Sentiment. And he is doing what he can to give rocks some more respect. One visitor at a time. He told Charlie that the mission at Emerald Village is grounded in connecting people to the world underneath their feet.
Alan Schabilion: One is to preserve our mining heritage. Second is to share it. Mm-hmm.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: What keeps you going out there and looking for gems and minerals? You know, I mean, you've been doing it for decades, so what keeps you going out there?
Alan Schabilion: Well, you always keep hoping to find the big one, you know, the million dollar emerald, but I just, I don't really look at, at it for the money.
I enjoy getting out in the, in the, in the mountains. I always have an eye to the ground though, as I'm walking around, because you never know what you're stepping over or what's buried just underneath your. Hmm.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: Perfect. Well, I think I'm gonna go outside now and walk around and look for something interesting on the ground.
Um, thanks so much for chatting with me, Mr. Shabilion. I, I really appreciate it.
Alan Schabilion: Well, thank you for coming and, and sharing with us and I hope you have a gem of a day.
Charlie Shelton-Ormond: I will. Thank you sir. Alright, you too. Bye bye-Bye.
Anisa Khalifa: This episode of The Broadside was produced by Charlie Shelton Ormond and edited by Jerad Walker. Our executive producer is Wilson Sayre. The Broadside is a production of WUNC North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR network. If you have feedback or a story idea, you can email us at broadside@wunc.org.
If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating or review or share it with a friend. I am Anisa Khalifa. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.