About Us
A Global perspective
Searles Valley Minerals manages extensive operations in California’s Searles Valley. Power and production facilities cover more than 339 acres at the Argus, Trona and Westend plants in California.
Adjacent to one of the world’s primary ports, Searles Valley Minerals ships thousands of tons of high grade mineral product daily to major manufacturers in 52 countries. Overseas sales account for over half of our annual revenue. The Searles Valley Minerals sales staff has spent years cultivating and actively responding to the needs of markets in Western Europe, South America, Australia and the Pacific Rim.
We are more than a commodity producer. Our mission is to meet the needs of our customers around the world with “leadership in services and quality.” Advancing technology around the globe and our rapid response to new demands and opportunities make many things possible — TV sets; personal computers; calculators; digital clocks; books and magazines; clean clothes; a tank of gas; reflective traffic signs.
Management
Dennis Cruise
President
Pamela Ford
Vice President, Sales & Marketing
Don Pemberton
Chief Financial Officer
TIMELINE
While mining gold and silver in the Slate Range mountains with three partners, an engineer working for John W. Searles complains that the soda from the salt flats below, now called Searles Dry Lake, contained too much borax to properly process the ore. Searles takes samples of this soda to a company that had recently started mining borax near Clear Lake in northern California, but their assay showed no borax. Searles returns to mining gold and silver.
(Photo credit: The Searles Valley Historical Society)
American Trona Corporation introduces the Three Elephant brand name for borax. The name indicates strength relative to the competing 20 - Mule Team brand.
North American Chemical Company improves borax mining on Searles Lake and uses this to almost double borax production at the Westend Plant. They also increase soda ash production at the Argus Plant. Finally, they shut down all potash and borax production at the Trona Plant, bringing to an end the eighty-one year history of recovering potash from Searles Lake brines.
Nirma acquires Searles Valley Minerals Incorporated.
Our history
We are as rich in history as the land we mine.
The vast mineral resource in Searles Dry Lake is the result of unique geological forces. These included raising of the Sierra Nevada Range, nearly a million years of volcanic activity and intermittent glaciation. Glacial ice ground the mountains into fine powders easily leached by glacial melt-water and volcanic hot springs brought other soluble minerals to the surface. Together these mineral-laden waters flowed through a chain of lakes where sand and mud settled leaving only mineralized water to enter Searles Valley. Between glacial events, intense desert heat evaporated all the water and the dissolved minerals crystallized, leaving Searles Lake as it exists today with its 16 saline mineral layers separated by layers of mud. The last glaciation followed by drying ended about 10,000 years ago. Today the deposit contains 4 billion tons of soluble mineral salts and extends to a depth of about 350 feet.
(Photo credit: The Searles Valley Historical Society)
Mineral production from Searles Dry Lake first began in 1873. Over a century later in December 1990, Searles Valley Minerals acquired all the mineral and manufacturing assets in Searles Valley. These assets were first developed by the historic companies American Potash and Chemical Corporation and the Westend Chemical Company and later owned by Kerr-McGee, Harris Corporation, IMC Chemicals and Sun Capital before becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of Nirma Ltd. in December 2007. Nirma Ltd. is a private company in India that is a large integrated manufacturer of consumer products (primarily detergents, soaps and salt) as well as of soda ash and industrial salt. Searles Valley Minerals utilizes a unique solution mining technology to extract the minerals from beneath the surface of Searles Lake and recovers these minerals in its three manufacturing plants–Argus, Trona and Westend.
