If you think about it, salt is the foundation of
our economy. Cities have been named in its legacy.
Wars fought over it.
It's been taxed.
It occurs naturally nearly everywhere on
earth. And at times it was even used as money
itself. Think of the word salary.
It comes from ancient Romans that paid soldiers
partially in salt.
That's a political fact of life everywhere you
look. If salt gets expensive, people get
angry.
There are over 14,000 different uses for salt.
And in 2021, the global salt market was worth
over $13 billion.
Now the US market is dominated by three big
players: Morton Salt, Cargill and Compass
Minerals. And only one is publicly traded.
Be cause Harvey Salt is a distributor, we have the
ability to procure salt from all the major salt
suppliers.
So now we have a much more concentrated
industry than we've had before.
Perhaps it's a response to how demand for salt
has shifted through history.
This is an issue that affects everybody on a
daily basis.
What they eat, the power that they get, the roads
that they drive on.
If too much salt permeates our
environment, the effects can be dangerous.
Here's how Salt became one of the most
game-changing minerals in the world and what
will happen if the world keeps getting saltier.
So in front of me, I have two different kinds
of salt. We have Morton's table salt and
we have Cargill's Diamond Crystal brand
de-icing salt.
Both of these are 100% sodium chloride.
The biggest difference is how they're processed.
So for the table salt, this is food grade.
So it needs to be refined for human
consumption. Whereas the de-icing salt is not
produced in food grade conditions.
So you really wouldn't want to eat this.
And most plentiful of the ocean's treasures, salt
can be taken from the sea.
Throughout history, most salt was harvested
through salt water evaporation of some kind,
and eventually good old fashioned mining methods.
However, the salt on your dinner table, it
most likely came from solution mining.
Water is pumped into these underground salt
beds, making artificial brines.
Without water, salt pretty much looks like
this. But to get it to food grade like this, we
have to use another method.
Vacuum pan.
So the artificial brine is then pumped back up
into a facility above ground where heat or both
heat and a vacuum evaporates the water,
leaving the sodium behind.
This is also how the shape of the grain can
change, like your finer table salt or a coarser
pink Himalayan salt, or even something super
fancy like this really flaky salt.
The market for salt doesn't start and end
with food. Actually, most of the salt used or
sold in the US doesn't even come from vacuum pan
. We're seeing a slight decline in food use every
year. For example, in this chart, table salt
isn't even explicitly identified, but somewhere
between food processing and distributors like
grocery stores. Table salt is only some part of
that 13% of the market.
That might be because salt in the food industry
was once even more important.
Provisions to last us on the long journey.
It was needed for preservation, not just to
make food taste better.
There was very little food you could export
without salt.
Vegetables, meat, fish, it all needed salt.
So you could not have an international economy if
you didn't have salt.
It's packed for shipment to markets all over the
world.
Thanks to refrigeration.
Don't worry about things souring and spoiling this
summer.
And frozen food. The electronic oven to
defrost.
Demand has shifted dramatically.
To this.
The majority is de-icing salt.
Which is about as prosaic a use as I could imagine.
Highway de-icing salts accounted for about 42%
of the total salt consumed or sold in 2022.
This is the largest salt mine in the world.
De-icing salt like what I have right here primarily
comes from rock salt.
And US salt production is led by rock salt at 43%
of the market in 2022.
So it makes sense that most rock salt mined ends
up as an ice melt product.
And since the US uses an estimated 20 million
metric tons of salt on roads every year,
governments take bids from a bunch of companies
to buy in bulk.
There are governments in the US every year that
need to buy large quantities of salt.
Companies like Compass Minerals or Morton Salt
or Cargill will have to submit bids each year for
volumes and prices.
So for the salt companies, they can bid a
fixed price. Then they essentially take on the
risk of can they deliver the salt for that price
and still make a good profit.
If it doesn't snow the phones do not ring.
Salt only costs pennies per pound, but it costs
dollars per bag to move it.
It's very heavy.
And rock salt is at the lower end of the price
scale for salt products, averaging $60 per bulk
unit in 2022, compared to vacuum pan salts,
averaging $230 per bulk unit.
And that makes sense, right? The vacuum pan
salt takes a lot more time, machinery
processing, you name it, to get to that food grade
status. But the largest market for sodium
chloride behind deicing salts is chemical.
It made up 39% of salt sales in 2022.
Salt is needed to manufacture chlorine and
caustic soda, which are then used to create
products like household cleaners and plastics.
So think back to this solution mining process
and the artificial brine before it's processed.
The chemical industry uses that artificial
brine as a chemical feedstock.
Of 40% salt in brine used in 2022, most of it 91%,
was used to make chemicals. And it's even
cheaper than rock salt, averaging $8.50 per bulk
unit.
Salt has a very low value to weight ratio, meaning
you can't transport it that far to make it
economically viable.
So you can't really ship salt all around the
world.
However, there is one slice of the salt market
that relies on plenty of imports.
Solar salt.
Solar salt made up only 8% of what was used or
sold in 2022.
As the name suggests, brines, including
artificial brines, are organized into ponds that
are left to evaporate in the sunlight.
It's classic economics.
Where else is there more sunshine to make solar
salt than somewhere a little closer to the
equator?
It actually is less costly to bring it in
from the Caribbean, where the warm waters
there and the arid and windy climate are the
most conducive to production of solar salts
generated from seawater.
Solar salt is the biggest chunk of salt imports to
North America by far.
We are adjacent to the port of Baltimore, so
that is where oceangoing vessels bring in the
majority of water treatment salt, what we
call solar salt, water softener, removes the
hardness ions, which can develop scale inside the
pipe. So a food processing plant,
pharmaceutical facility, education market, K-12,
hospitals, retirement communities, nursing
homes, people that use a lot of water need to
soften and condition that water.
Industries don't want hard water that could
reduce the life of equipment.
But the issue goes even deeper than that.
There is a fascinating tension with salt in the
environment because we do need salt in our
everyday lives.
It's kind of like a Goldilocks type thing.
Too much or too little, you just need the right
amount.
Salty water can be dangerous.
Freshwater getting saltier is a widespread
problem in the US and globally.
The problem is the groundwater is now nearly
as salty as the ocean.
Some of the major rivers and streams in the world
have been showing these increasing trends.
A third of the rivers have become more salty in
the past 25 years.
Why? Because salt is corrosive.
Chloride corrodes metal.
It can affect the roads that we drive on.
There's rebar metal structures that hold
roads together. And when it interacts with that
rebar, it can dissolve the rebar and then it
causes the road to buckle.
The most obvious way salt enters the environment,
the very same deicing salts keeping our roads
safe. They're estimated to cause anywhere from
$800 to $3300 in structural damage for
every ton used, according to the EPA.
Overall corrosion of US transportation
infrastructure costs are in the billions.
Sodium chloride isn't even the only kind of
salt. Mineral salts are abundant.
You know, we think about building up areas like
with parking lots, pavements, buildings and
all that. And when they break down, they release
salts because there's calcium and carbonate
that's used to make the built environment.
It breaks down releasing salts into the
environment, which can affect water quality.
That backwashing salt water would flow through
the limestone and ruin millions of rich
producing acres.
Imagine metal pipes with saltier water flowing t
hrough.
Then it goes through a whole labyrinth of pipes
to homes. That salty water can interact with
the pipes and mobilize more metals.
Water with more chlorides is going to leach metal
from the wall of the pipes, making the water
corrosive. This can create what the EPA calls
salt chemical cocktails.
What happens is it can't be removed from the water
treatment plant. Instead, they try to
treat it as best as they can.
People are taking it more seriously now
because they've seen evidence of these
leaching phenomenons.
What the pipes are producing.
In Flint, Michigan, dangerous levels of lead
were discovered.
Flint River. It was a complicated issue, but
they had switched their water to the Flint River,
which had elevated chlorides and
corrosivity.
The buildup of salt can cause a phenomenon called
the freshwater salination syndrome.
We might experience in our everyday life
corrosion of a home appliance, a road falling
apart or pipe running rusty black water.
We do take the impacts of salt with a grain of
salt and we don't know, you know, all the impacts
yet.
The EPA says freshwater salination syndrome is
not easily remedied.
So salt can be a problem, but it can also be a
solution. For example, other salts are being
used instead of sodium chloride, like calcium
chloride and potassium chloride.
They're substitutes for de-icing salts, but right
now they come at a higher cost.
We've seen significant increases in the amount
of ice melter that we have sold with lower
fewer chlorides in it versus straight rock
salt, which has a significant amount of
chlorides in it.
Innovation is happening to make salt more
eco-friendly.
You know, then we're also seeing new products go
into de-icing salt.
I think part of the innovation that allows a
coating of salt to stay on the road longer, part
of that does reduce the runoff that goes into the
water. So when salt companies are innovating
to you, say pre-storm salt versus having to
wait till it snows and then salting the roads,
a lot of that pre-storm salt is an upgraded
product that can last through an entire storm
versus having to put two or 3 or 4 layers of salt
down on the roads that likely leads to less salt
being run off in the waterways.
And some cities are figuring out how to use
less salt. Turns out, less is more.
I mean, we have a lot of dedicated people trying
to reduce salt in the environment and they're
cognizant of the problem. I mean, people
weren't completely aware of this issue like over
the last decades. But as more and more research
has come out, they've become more aware and
they're really trying the best that they can.
It's hard to imagine a world without salt,
especially increasing severe weather, that may
result in more road salt to keep drivers safe.
In years when there are heavy winters and there's
a lot of snow, we do see salt prices tend to rise.
But when there's winters that are very mild, the
salt producers tend to have excess inventory
that they couldn't sell because nobody buys salt
when it's not snowing.
When that happens, we see prices tend to fall.
Salt was immensely critical in shaping the
world we live in today.
A slab of rock salt.
Transparent crystal cubes and the kind you
use on your table.
So it's no surprise that salt could transform the
world ahead of us, too.
It's funny because I have a son and you watch these
movies like Wall-E, right?
The last robot on Earth.
It's a cute movie where it talks about how Earth
is polluted and people have to move off of it
for a while. By thinking about how we develop
versus conservation can really do future
generations a lot of good because the more we
develop the saltier the water is going to get.