Located in western Colorado, Natural Soda is the second largest producer of natural sodium bicarbonate in North America. The company’s product is used domestically and worldwide in the food and baking, personal care and pharmaceutical, animal nutrition and agriculture, pool and water treatment, and industrial markets.
An entrant for FieldComm Group’s 2018 Plant of the Year Award, Natural Soda produces sodium bicarbonate from its extensive nahcolite leases, which cover more than 9,400 acres at our processing facility located in the Piceance Creek Basin in Colorado. The Piceance Creek Basin contains North America’s only known significant deposit of nahcolite and Natural Soda is currently the only company taking advantage of this world-class resource.
Natural Soda mines nahcolite using solution mining, a technique that drills pairs of wells into the mineral-bearing layer 1,900 feet below ground. Steam is injected via one well, and saturated nahcolite solution is pumped out of the other for further processing.
The original Natural Soda facility was built in 1990 with the capacity to produce 60,000 tons per annum (tpa) of feed-grade product to be sold domestically. Expansion in 1996 increased capacity to 125,000 tpa. In March 2013, Natural Soda completed construction of an additional production train, increasing annual production from 125,000 tpa to 250,000 tpa. The production site has grown in multiple ways: increasing production has meant adding new well pairs and the requirements for the amount of data collected has also increased. This has meant more instrumentation at each well.
Given the high cost of wiring for the additional instruments and reaching new injection wells progressively farther from the central facility, Natural Soda adopted WirelessHART for all of its wellheads. With the most recent expansions, the company has now deployed 60 wireless instruments across 10 wellheads.