One of the oldest chemicals known to man is soda ash; Salt
and lime are the oldest chemicals. It
dates back 3,500 years to the Egyptians who extracted it from wood ash. According to an article posted by International Mining: “New technology
mines one of the world’s oldest chemicals” July 15, 2009, Soda ash from trona
is involved in virtually every aspect of life, through the manufacturing of
glass, in chemical manufacturing, fertilizers, soaps and detergents, pulp and
paper, flue gas desulphurization, and water treatment. In the 1938, the presence of trona was found
in a core sample while drilling for oil at the John Hay No. 1 Well south of Westvaco, Wyoming.
Trona was first deep-mined in 1947 by Westvaco Chlorine. Shortly after that, FMC Corp acquired Westvaco’s chemical business,
including the mine, and then added the Granger mines.
The beds in which they all operate began forming 50 million
years ago when Lake
Gosiute covered deposited
volcanic ash later. The deposits formed
in more than 42 beds of trona in the Green
River Basin of southwest Wyoming, stretching from
the Uintah Mountains of Utah in the south, along the Wyoming Range to the west, the Rock Springs uplift to the east to the Wind River and Gros
Ventre Mountains
in the north.
Today, more than 90 percent of the soda ash used in America
comes from Wyoming
trona mines. Wyoming trona mines employ more than 2,225
people. About 44 percent of the trona in
Wyoming is produced from Federal government lands and some 56 percent from
State government and private lands, all of it deep-mined using boring machines
with continuous haulage, continuous miners with continuous haulage and shuttle
cars, and, at the Solvay and FMC
mines, long walls.
Well, that is enough of the boring information on
trona. I had the privilege of seeing
this type of mining while on a mission trip to Granger. It all started when a friend from Kemmerer, Wyoming,
from an earlier mission trip, invited the Chilton Baptist Builders to a tour of
the trona mines. Four of us said we
would go. Arriving at the mine site, we
saw a large building that housed a conveyer belt and railroad cars. From the highway, it did not appear to be
much of an operation. We were in for a
shock.
The first item of business for the tour was a short course
on survival in case of a cave-in. We
were instructed how to operate life support systems until we could locate an
air shaft leading to the surface. At the
conclusion of the safety survival course, we had to sign a release form. I was starting to worry a tad at that point.
In the large building was an open cage enclosed
elevator. This elevator was large enough
for two pickups to park side-by-side.
The elevator descended 1300 feet, that’s right 1300 feet, into the Wyoming ground. That large elevator opening looked like a
pinhole in a cardboard box as we reached the bottom. We them loaded onto a mine car not too much
different from the originally runaway mine cars at Six Flags Over Georgia. We went two miles, that right, two miles in
the mineshafts.
It was amazing how the equipment worked. One neat thing was how they reinforced the
mineshafts. They would drill holes in
the trona, place epoxy tubes in the holes, and the screw threaded rods in the
epoxy.
Underground were these large pieces equipment. Someone asked how they got the equipment in
the mine. We were told that it came in
pieces assembled in the mobile shop at the bottom of the mines. There canteens, coke and candy vending
machines, offices, and everything underground.
The reason was that the Wyoming
winters were so harsh that two weeks a year most people were homebound. In the mines, the temperature varied very
little, around 68 degrees.
I noticed that there was no ground water so I asked where it
was. Our mines at the cement plant in Calera, Alabama
pumped millions of gallons of water from the limestone. Our guide said that there was no ground water
in that part of Wyoming. Being that the Granger Baptist
Church was beside a
river, which looked like a creek to me, I asked, “What about the lakes and
rivers?” Our guide said that that was
melting snow. Lakes were constructed as
reservoirs catching the snow runoff. Well,
that explained why that river was a crystal-clear 48-50 degrees in July. One of the heating and air-conditioner guys
had measured it with a thermometer. That
also explained why a river in the Uintah Mountains would not pass for a creek
or branch in Chilton County Alabama. For
some odd reason the earth sure did look beautiful when we got back to the top
and took a trip to the Uintah Mountains. Those trout were beautiful in that
melted snow, the vegetation was lush green and the mountains were white
capped. The world does look better on
top.
Man puts an end to the
darkness; he searches the farthest recesses for ore in the blackest
darkness. Far from where people dwell he
cuts a shaft, in places forgotten by the foot of man; far from men he dangles
and sways (Job 28:3-4 NIV).
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