INDUSTRIAL SALT AND LIQUID BROMINE

Industrial Salt

Oceans cover about 70 percent of the Earth’s surface and about 97 percent of all water on and in the Earth is saline—there’s a lot of salty water on our planet. The rain that falls on the land contains some dissolved carbon dioxide from the surrounding air. This causes the rainwater to be slightly acidic due to carbonic acid. The rain physically erodes the rock and the acids chemically break down the rocks and carries salts and minerals along in a dissolved state as ions. The ions in the runoff are carried to the streams and rivers and then to the ocean.

Many of the dissolved ions are used by organisms in the ocean and are removed from the water. The two ions that are present most often in seawater are chloride and sodium. These two make up over 90% of all dissolved ions in seawater.

The concentration of salt in seawater (its salinity) is about 35 parts per thousand; in other words, about 3.5% of the weight of seawater comes from the dissolved salts. Sea salt is salt that is produced by the evaporation of seawater. It is used as a seasoning in foods, cooking, cosmetic and for preserving food.

Throughout the world the main sources of salt are sea water, lake water and rock salt deposits. Salt is recovered from the sea and lakes by evaporation. Rock salt may be mined like coal, or recovered by drilling wells into the salt bed, forcing down pure water and pumping up the saturated brine which forms.

Commercially available sea salts on the market today vary widely in their chemical composition. Although the principal component is sodium chloride, the remaining portion can range from less than 0.2 to 10% of other salts. These are mostly calcium, potassium, and magnesium salts of chloride and sulfate with substantially lesser amounts of many trace elements found in natural seawater.

Though the composition of commercially available salt may vary, the ionic composition of natural saltwater is relatively constant.