ARGUS, WESTEND AND TRONA

The Argus facility produces soda ash and preprocesses brine for additional mineral extraction at the Westend facility. Processing may sound complicated yet the soda ash produced is natural. Argus heats trona-bearing brine from a layer 200 ft. to 500 ft. below the lake's surface. It mixes the brine with carbon dioxide - provided in part from our power generation plant - to crystallize it into sodium bicarbonate, which is commonly known as baking soda. Additional carbon dioxide for this process streams in as recycled gas. Processing continues with bleaching and finally recrystallization into dense soda ash. After processing, most of the brine goes back to the lake and the remaining brine goes to the Westend plant where it returns to the lake after further processing.

The Westend facility takes brine from sodium sulfate-rich layer 20 ft. to 80 ft. below the lake's surface. By introducing heat into the brine layer, we raise the concentration of borates. Westend refrigerates the brine in a two-step process that produces primary borax and sodium sulfate decahydrate. Recrystallizing equipment transforms some of the primary borax into V-BOR ®) pentahydrate borax. The remaining primary borax moves on to the Trona facility to make various borax products.

The Trona facility houses two production plants. One plant produces boric acid and the other makes borax products. Trona's boric acid plant uses a solvent extraction process to recover boric acid from low-sodium borate brine pumped from a layer 100 ft. to 130 ft. below the lakes's surface. The extraction process won the Miles W. Kirkpatrick Award for outstanding chemical engineering achievement in 1963. The Trona facility is more than its mineral refining and finishing systems. Its historic campus houses most of the administrative offices, warehouse space, and packaging equipment for the three facilities in Searles Valley.

The Plant Logistics team is part of the Searles Valley Minerals distribution network, which includes Trona Railway, Port Facilities at San Diego and Long Beach and distribution centers located throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Trona Railway Company LLC (TRC) is the largest short line railroad carrier operating in California today, providing dependable, high quality rail transportation for Searles Valley Minerals. The 31-mile standard gauge railroad connects with Union Pacific Railroad at Searles Junction, California.

TRC is as important for bringing in fuel and process chemicals to Searles Valley as it is for product delivery. TRC transports two million tons of freight each year with its own fleet of locomotives and railcars. TRC's six SD-40-2 locomotives have six axles, which give better traction to push or pull heavy loads up the steep 2% grade.