Two of Turkey’s leading industrial conglomerates, each with important glassmaking and raw materials production interests, have announced a partnership agreement to produce natural soda ash in the USA’s Green River, Wyoming area. Sisecam Group, already one of the world’s leading players in synthetic soda via its Soda Sanayii AS subsidiary, is to make the investment with Ciner Group, who maintains significant knowhow in natural soda production.

Sisecam Group is one of the world’s top seven synthetic soda ash producers, with an annual production capacity of 2.4 million tons. This involves 1.4 million tons at the Mersin soda plant in eastern Turkey, 585,000 tons at Lukavac in Bosnia and Herzegovina and 375,000 tons in Bulgaria, where the group operates a production partnership with Solvay.

Ciner Group is the world’s largest natural soda producer, thanks to its total production capacity of seven million tons/year. This comprises 2.7 million tons in Kazan and 1.8 million tons at Eti Soda from solution mining operations in Turkey and 2.5 million tons in the USA via conventional mining.

According to Sisecam Group Vice President and CEO Professor Ahmed Kirman, the joint investment at Green River will employ an advanced, low cost solution mining technique. “This investment will be important in boosting our global market share by strengthening our position in Asia and Europe” he explained. “We will become one of the world’s top five players in soda ash production and have taken another giant step towards our goal to be among the top three.”

Operations are expected to start in 2024, following acquisition of the necessary operating permits and licenses.