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WILL TRONA MINING SPARK A TRADE
WAR WITH CHINA?
Chinese trade policies impact Wyoming mining industry
Domestic mine article by Harold Hough June/July 2009
Most people don’t know what trona is. But, that may not
stop it from causing a trade war with China, which is instituting
policies that give Chinese trona an unfair advantage over the
American mined mineral. “Wyoming’s trona industry has
been an integral part of our state’s economy for decades,
but it simply cannot compete with an unfairly subsidized Chinese
product,” said Congresswoman Cynthia Lummis (R-Wy). “Hands
down Wyoming’s soda ash is a better product than synthetic
Chinese produced soda ash.”
For those who don’t know, trona is a naturally occurring
mineral that is known chemically as sodium sesquicarbonate. The
final product is called soda ash or bicarbonate of soda. It has
many uses, but the one most familiar to people is as baking soda.
However it’s also used in glass manufacturing, paper, food
additives, laundry products, medicine, air pollution control and
animal feed. In fact, glassmaking consumes about half of soda
ash output.
Until recently, soda ash was synthetically produced. Then in 1938,
trona was discovered during oil and gas exploration in Wyoming.
The first mine was built in 1946 in Sweetwater, Wyoming and commercial
production began in 1948. Wyoming has the world’s largest
deposits of trona and is responsible for nearly 90 percent of
the world’s soda ash production. One reason is that trona
is a rare mineral and there are only a few locations where it
is found - Africa, China, Turkey, and Mexico. But, the only site
where it is commercially mined is in the Green River Basin of
Wyoming.
Fifty million years ago, the Green River Basin and surrounding
areas were covered by a 20,000 square mile land-locked lake. As
the earth changed though the ages, the water in the lake evaporated.
What was left behind was over 100 billion tons of nearly pure
trona wedged in between layers of sandstone and shale. The trona
deposit varies in depth from 800 to 3500 feet below the surface
and contains 42 layers of trona. Actual mining occurs at a depth
of 800 to 1600 feet in beds that are 8 to 10 feet thick. A recent
report by the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the total
reserve is 127 billion tons of trona and mixed trona and halite
in beds 4 feet or more thick. This is enough trona to supply U.S.
demand at current production rates for 6,684 years, and world
demand for about 2,000 years.
Currently four companies mine trona in Wyoming: FMC, General Chemical,
OCI, and Solvay Chemical. The General Chemical mine is in Southwestern
Wyoming, 40 miles west of Rock Springs and 175 miles northeast
of Salt Lake City. It operates round the clock, seven days a week
and its underground tunnels cover over 20 square miles. Trona
is a relatively hard mineral that once was mined with blasting.
However, today, General Chemical uses more conventional methods
like room and pillar mining to mine over 4 million tons of trona
a year.
The mine uses rotary shears and bore mining. Each rotary shear
uses a single 10 foot wide drum with 90 tungsten carbide tips
to rip the trona from the ore face. The bore miner cuts a 9 foot
high passage using vertical rotary arms that contain 50 tungsten
carbide metal tips. The advantage of the bore miner is that it
produces a finer ground ore, which makes processing easier.
After mining, the trona goes through a series of processes that
grind, heat, dissolve, filter and purify the product before shipping.
The final soda ash produce is then loaded on rail cars, where
much of it is shipped to Port Authur, Texas or Portland, Oregon
for export.
It is this American domination of the soda ash industry that has
caused the Chinese to implemented trade policies to artificially
discount synthetic soda ash exported from that nation. On April
1, China implemented a nine percent rebate on soda ash to Chinese
exporters. With this special tax subsidy Chinese soda ash will
be more in line with the price of Wyoming soda ash and could impact
Wyoming’s mining industry.
US Senator Mike Enzi of Wyoming noted, “Hands down Wyoming’s
soda ash is a better product than synthetic Chinese produced soda
ash. But value added taxes and rebates offered by the Chinese
government discount their soda ash enough that it distorts global
prices and woos buyers. We shouldn’t let China leave Wyoming
soda ash in the dust. We are asking the U.S. trade representative
to eliminate tax hurdles and allow the best product to win without
price distortions,”
There are also environmental reasons for supporting Wyoming’s
trona industry. The synthetic process used by many other countries
like China costs twice as much and generates five times the amount
of waste as natural U.S. trona. “Wyoming soda ash producers
can successfully compete throughout global markets when the playing
field is level,” said US Senator John Barrasso. It’s
also used by industries as varied as glass, cement, waste incineration,
gold and other precious metal refining, petroleum refining, pulp
& paper, and electric power generation for air pollution control
because it effectively removes sulfur oxides (SOx), hydrogen sulfide
(H2S), hydrochloric acid (HCl), and hydrofluoric acid (HF) from
flue gas emissions.
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