What Is Soda Ash?

| Presented by WE Soda - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0f3qFXVcYY

Transcript:
join me on a journey as we discover soda ash from the ground up. my name is
Selena Downes, in this series I'll be exploring a white granular substance that's
been with us for more than 5000 years, yet most of us know very little about. it's
used to clean our air and soften our water and even helps to sweeten our drinks,
it's used to manufacture the glass in our buildings and the bottles we drink from
as well as keeping our houses clean and animals fed. This chemical is also playing
a key role in the new wave of mobility, it's used in the batteries the power today's
electric vehicles like this one. it's also being used to minimize air pollution from
our global shipping industry by drastically reducing sulfur emissions. this is a story
of manufacturing prowess on a global scale, this is the story of sodium carbonate
known as soda ash but what exactly is it and where does it come from? to find out
more, I've come to the British Geological Survey based in Nottingham here in the
heart of the UK, I'm surrounded by some 200,000 rock specimens and four and a
half million fossils and I'm off to meet Andrew Bloodworth the science director, so
Andrew what is soda ash?
_Soda ash chemically it's sodium carbonate, it’s derived from a mineral called
Trona used in all sorts of things that we use every day everything from glass to
detergent to pharmaceuticals to food, it underpins our modern economy. The
ancient Egyptians were the first people to use soda ash they found deposits of
Trona out in the desert and they use that for making glass like we do but they also
used it for preserving mummies, summation, civilizations made it from plant ash
so certain plants that grow particularly in salty areas like marshes if you burn
them the ash is quite sodium rich and hence the term soda ash it's produced
today in two ways one is through a chemical process and the product that comes
out of that is like synthetic soda ash and the other is by mining Trona.
_let's explore further the story of natural soda ash, to find out more about how it
is produced I'm crossing the Atlantic to the big plains of Wyoming in the US
because as well as its famed Yellowstone National Park Wyoming has a hidden
secret underneath these Plains. it is here deep within the Green River Basin
where the crystal structure of Trona can be found in layered evaporate deposits
underground. some 800 feet beneath me ladies vast natural deposits that were
formed at some 66 million years ago it's the reason Wyoming is called the soda
ash capital of the world. I want to get a closer look so I'm meeting with mine
manager Wendy Straub to find out about conventional mining in Wyoming. well
we just descended down our service hoist about 850 feet, this area is the oldest
area in the mine it was constructed in 1962 with conventional drill blast, so the
miners would have drilled out the round they would have used a cutting machine
around the perimeter and loaded it with explosives and then blasted it out. and
how far does it stretch? so in its entirety if you were to go east and west it's
approximately five miles and north and south it's approximately ten miles. and
why do you find Trona so interesting it? takes a lot of different people to do the
planning and the execution to actually produce the Trona and get it onto the
surface so I think that it's really good to see from front to back the entire process
it fascinates me. For the past four years this mine has been run by Jinnah, it
produces two and a half million tons of soda ash each year I'm off to meet with
CEO and president Oguz Erkan to find out more. There not many natural soda ash
resources around the world, this location we were sitting on actually the 90% of
the world resource is located here. This is a 2.5 million metric ton production
facility with great ambition with growth, also 2025 we are adding 5 million tons of
soda ash production about 40 miles south of where we located today with two
new facilities. so how long will the trainer last. There is over 100 years’ worth of
resources available on that new project without considering any expansion
around it. I think responsible mining and utilizing the resource effectively is the
key. Tell me about your workforce and the people you employ. We have the most
productive workforce over in the throne' industry and Green River, we have four
hundred and forty-four employees located right here in this location and we have
44 additional over at the headquarters, we just become a huge family here, our
continued to grow. So where does all this talent come from and what goes into
training our future engineers? I come to the University of Wyoming which
specializes in engineering. I don't believe in gimmicks to survive as a program to
thrive we need incoming students who want to become engineers if they know
that there is a high possibility of a job in the future that creates a huge incentive.
Tell me specifically what the partnership with Jinnah provides. Updated
information as to what these operations will look like in the future and what they
look like now and the opportunity of internships and co-ops with their industry so
that our students get prepared for their job market. or how important is Trainer
to the region here. Let's start by saying that we have largest deposits in the world,
for Wyoming that means a significant job market for people who might have been
somewhere else and might be retrained so it's not just engineers there are
technical people at the local colleges that might be training in that area so we
complete that value change in the job market I believe. So our invisible ingredient
soda ash is big business for Wyoming. Here in the capital Cheyenne, Governor
Mark Gordon calls it an essential part of the economy and has praised its state of
the art industrial labor and environmental standards, with four companies
competing in the Basin Trona has become the state's largest foreign export
supporting thousands of jobs. next I'm off to Turkey to discover the new and
innovative ways that natural soda ash will be produced in the future