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Inorganic Chemicals

Chlorine investments proliferate in US

Projects will reduce transport of the dangerous chemical over long distances

by Michael McCoy
December 18, 2024 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 102, Issue 39

 

An aerial view of a water treatment facility.
Credit: Shutterstock
Most bleach is used in water treatment.

Multiple companies are making investments in the US with the same goal in mind: lowering costs while reducing the shipment of chlorine, a poisonous gas.

Chlorum Solutions USA, a newcomer to the country’s chemical production, says it will spend more than $70 million to build a plant in Casa Grande, Arizona, that converts salt directly into sodium hypochlorite (bleach), hydrochloric acid, and caustic soda. Bleach is traditionally made in regional plants from chlorine that has been shipped from large facilities that are mostly on the US Gulf Coast.

Chlorum says its plant, like seven such plants its affiliates operate in Latin America, will not store chlorine gas. “Our small-scale, local model reduces risks and costs associated with transporting liquefied chlorine gas across the country,” Daniel Croce, Chlorum Solutions USA’s CEO, says in a press release. The firm says potential customers are in water treatment and industrial markets.

Another company new to the US, the German firm PCC Group, says it will build a chlor-alkali facility on the grounds of Chemours’s titanium dioxide plant in DeLisle, Mississippi. PCC will supply chlorine directly to Chemours, which will use it to make the white pigment with the chloride method; PCC will sell coproduct caustic soda on the open market. Chemours’s suppliers currently ship chlorine to the Mississippi plant from other locations.

Meanwhile, Olin, which calls itself the biggest North American bleach producer, said at an investor conference earlier this month that it may build a facility in Southern California that converts salt into bleach. A slide from the conference says bleach production in that region “relies on long, uncertain raw material supply lines.”

And last month, the Caribbean conglomerate Ansa McAL acquired the US firm Bleachtech for $327 million. Bleachtech operates plants in Ohio and Virginia that, like the proposed Chlorum and Olin facilities, convert salt into bleach, hydrochloric acid, and caustic soda. Only about 12 kg of chlorine are present in the plants at any time, according to Ansa. “The Bleachtech plant is inherently safer and does not represent a threat to the surrounding community,” a company backgrounder says.

A 2023 US National Library of Medicine paper calls chlorine gas “the most frequent cause of major toxic release incidents internationally.” For example, a 2005 train collision in Graniteville, South Carolina, resulted in a chlorine leak that killed nine people.

But Nick Kovics, vice president for inorganic chemicals at Chemical Market Analytics by OPIS, a market research firm, says economics is playing at least as big a role as safety in guiding chlor-alkali investment. Chlorine can sell for as much as $1,000 per short ton on the US merchant market—some five times what it was a decade ago, Kovics says. At the same time, rail lines have been raising the rates they charge to ship chlorine.

Companies like Chlorum are betting that they can reduce costs by making bleach from salt rather than from chlorine shipped over long distances. “If chlorine was still $200 a ton you wouldn’t see these projects,” Kovics says.

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