China’s Ministry of Natural Resources has announced the discovery of two major high-purity quartz deposits – one near Qinling, Henan province, and the other in Altay, Xinjiang region. With State Council approval, it has officially designated high-purity quartz as the country’s 174th newly classified mineral.
Under current technological and economic parameters, high-purity quartz refers to rock that yields quartz sand with a silicon dioxide (SiO₂) content of at least 99.995% after beneficiation and purification. The material must also meet strict impurity, inclusion, and granularity thresholds for use in semiconductors, photovoltaics, and optics. The primary output is high-purity quartz sand.
A senior ministry official said high-purity quartz offers key properties – such as high-temperature resistance, corrosion resistance, low thermal expansion, electrical insulation, and light transmittance – that make it critical to strategic sectors like semiconductors and photovoltaics. Securing the material depends on access to suitable raw ore.
The official added that Chinese research institutions and enterprises have made significant progress in developing technologies for rapid screening, advanced purification, and targeted impurity removal. These developments have paved the way for industrial use of domestic high-purity quartz and helped build an emerging supply chain.
The deposits in Henan and Xinjiang exceed 35 million metric tons in reserves. Chinese companies and research teams have produced pilot-scale outputs of 4N5 purity (99.995%) and above, with some samples reaching 4N8 (99.998%). Paired with breakthroughs in resource assessment and purification depth, the discoveries move China closer to large-scale domestic production.
Industry sources said China has annually imported more than $1.5 billion of high-purity quartz sand, mainly from the Spruce Pine mine in the United States. This imported sand is primarily used to make quartz crucibles, essential for monocrystalline silicon production in the solar sector. Producing 1 GW of wafers consumes 25 to 30 metric tons of quartz sand.
Replacing imports with domestic supply could cut quartz crucible costs by 20% to 30% and lower wafer manufacturing costs by $0.01 to $0.02 per piece.
