Our Business
Our Resource
Our Strategic Advantage
Our History
Our Process
Our Products
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Our Business
Our business is to produce and sell natural sodium bicarbonate, commonly known as baking soda, for use in a wide variety of products and activities. We conduct our business operations through our wholly owned subsidiary, Natural Soda, Inc.
Our Resource and Strategic Advantage
We have a long held ambition to become the world’s lowest cost producer of sodium bicarbonate. Traditionally, sodium bicarbonate is manufactured synthetically using soda ash as a raw material. However, the Piceance Creek Basin in northwest Colorado contains a huge deposit of naturally occurring sodium bicarbonate in a mineral form known as nahcolite. The recovery of this
natural sodium bicarbonate offers significant cost advantages over the production of synthetically manufactured sodium bicarbonate.
Natural Soda’s operations and leases covering 9,543 acres are located about 54 miles northwest of Rifle, Colorado in an area known as the Piceance Creek Basin. It contains the world’s only known large scale deposit of nahcolite. We estimate we control over four billion tons of nahcolite and are the largest nahcolite owner by far in the
world.
Our History
We first gained an interest in this resource through our acquisition of a Bureau of Land Management lease, known as the Rock School Lease, in 1992 and we devoted a number of years of research, development and permitting activity to bring that lease into production. To achieve that objective we entered into agreements to design and fabricate a processing plant and commenced the construction of equipment.
However, in February 2003, we successfully completed the acquisition of the business operations of a company owning the adjoining leases that were already in production. This immediately gained us access to an existing customer base, production facilities and very substantial additional lease resources of nahcolite. We plan to use the equipment and plans we have already developed to expand the production capacity of our acquired operations.
Our Process
We recover this natural sodium bicarbonate using a process known as solution mining. This requires pumping hot water approximately 1900 feet underground, dissolving the
nahcolite and bringing the saturated liquor to the surface where we
recover the sodium bicarbonate as a fine white crystalline powder. We package product in various grades of purity and crystal size in 50 lb. bags, 2000 lb. “supersacks”, or in bulk, and transport to our customers by truck or rail. We are capable of producing more than 110,000 tons per year.
Our Products
Our products have many uses and applications. They include sales to the animal feed, industrial, food and pharmaceutical grade markets. Sodium bicarbonate is used in baking products, personal care products including toothpaste and antacid tablets; household products including deodorisers, cleaning products, detergents, carpet cleaners, bath salts and kitty litter; and in industrial situations and uses such as leather tanning, fire extinguishers, blast media and waste water treatment.
We sell our products throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico. Our principal competitors are Church & Dwight, manufacturers of the Arm & Hammer brand; FMC Corporation and Solvay Chemicals.
The production of sodium bicarbonate potentially enables the production of soda ash and caustic soda, chemicals widely used in the manufacture of glass, detergents and a variety of inorganic and organic chemicals. Sodium bicarbonate
is also used as an agent for flue gas desulfurization, a market that may expand as the requirements of the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act impact more significantly on the power generation industry.
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