Life’s invisible ingredient; Sodium Carbonate, Na2CO3
The ancient Egyptians recovered Soda Ash from dry dessert lake beds or produced it by burning marine plants with high sodium content to produce ashes, which gave the commonly used name of ‘Soda Ash’. They used it to reduce the melting point of silica sand to produce glass vessels and ornaments – the same basic production technique used in glass manufacturing today. The Romans also used its related compound, Sodium Bicarbonate, for medicinal purposes and to make bread.

Successive generations produced Soda Ash in this way until the mid-1800s, when synthetic production techniques were first developed, to supply the increasing demand from an industrialising world.

How is Soda Ash made?
Today, Soda Ash (Sodium Carbonate) is produced by two main methods, both of which produce chemically identical Soda Ash.

As of 2021, global production of Soda Ash is estimated to reach 62.2 million mt per year.

Natural Soda Ash production: Natural Soda Ash is produced by extracting naturally occurring Trona ore and then processing this via a simple process of filtering, concentration, crystallisation and drying into Soda Ash which can be sold. Today, this accounts for around 30% of global production.

Commercially exploitable Trona deposits only occur geologically in three regions of the world: Enormous deposits in Wyoming, USA, large deposits in Turkey and much smaller and chemically less pure deposits in China. Today, natural Soda Ash is only produced in Wyoming, USA and Turkey.

Synthetic Soda Ash production: Synthetic Soda Ash is produced using a chemical production process using either the so-called Solvay or Hou method, in which salt (sodium chloride) is reacted with limestone (calcium carbonate) and coking coal in the presence of ammonia to produce synthetic Soda Ash.

Synthetic Soda Ash accounts for about 70% of global production, and is a more costly and a far more energy and water intensive production process than natural production methods.