The largest employer in the northwesternmost tip of San Bernardino County is cutting the number of its employees by more than half.
In recent months and years, Trona-based Searles Valley Minerals has been beset on all sides by financial challenges, including steeply rising operational costs including water prices, government regulation, competition in the form of foreign-government subsidized underpricing of one of its primary products by its major international competitors and California’s rising energy prices.
Searles Valley Minerals Inc. is a raw materials mining and production operating out of three distinct locations in and around Trona within Searles Valley and overseen by a corporate office in Overland Park, Kansas. Since 2008, it has been owned by the Indian company Nirma. The operations at Trona pertain at this time almost entirely to the mining of natural soda ash and extraction of boric acid, salt cake, sodium carbonate, sodium carbonate and specialty forms of borax and salt from Searles Dry Lake. The mining/extraction process consists of utilizing purified water to soak the earth in the lake to create brine, thereafter liberating the minerals from the solution.
Gold and silver prospector John Wemple Searles came across the borax in the dry lake later named for him in the 1860s and by the 1870s was mining borax under the name of the San Bernardino Borax Mining Company, conveying the product to San Pedro by mule team-pulled wagons. Searles sold his operation to Francis Smith, who owned the Pacific Coast Borax Company.
The dry lake and its surrounding area are rich in trona and a host of minerals.
In 1914, a joint British/South African company, Consolidated Gold Fields, anticipating the need for potash during what was then called the Great War and now referred to as World War I completed the Trona Railway line from Searles Station to a junction with the Southern Pacific Railroad. Simultaneously, the American Trona Corporation established the company-owned town of Trona adjacent to Searles Dry Lake, and the production of potash began in 1915. In 1926, after becoming the Trona Corporation became the American Potash & Chemical Corporation, it began producing borax, soda ash, and sodium sulfate.
The town of Trona during the 1940s during peak production as part of the U.S. war effort, at one point had a population of nearly 7,000, making it the 11th largest city/town in San Bernardino County. Most of its residents were employees of the mining company and those employees were paid in company scrip rather than US currency, which was used to purchase goods at company-owned stores, meals at company-run restaurants or secure entertainment or diversion at company-owned movie theaters, bowling alleys or poolhalls.
In the post World War II-era to the present, there were several innovations in the mining and refining operations with regard to liberating the differing minerals from the dry lake brine including the use of a lime kiln and massive industrial boilers, some of which were fired by coal, gas or cleaner-burning coal fired up on a fluid bed. A steam-carrying pipeline was installed. At various times, emphases on the final product or products being derived shifted among potash, borax and sodium sulfate.
In 1956, the Stauffer Chemical Company acquired the West End Chemical Company plant, located on the south side of Searles Lake in Trona.
In 1974 American Potash and Chemical was acquired by Kerr-McGee. In October of that year, Stauffer sold its West End facility in Trona to the Kerr-McGee Chemical Corporation in October 1974. In 1982, Kerr-McGee reduced production drastically and instituted massive layoffs.
In 1990, Kerr-McGee sold the Searles Valley production facilities to capital investors D. George Harris and Associates, which formed the North American Chemical Company. In 1996 the production of potash in Trona was discontinued.
Ownership changed hands in 1998 when IMC Global Corporation acquired North American Chemical Company. In 2004, Sun Capital, LLC purchased IMC Global Corporation and the North American Chemical Company facilities at Trona and Westend were renamed Searles Valley Minerals, Inc. In November 2007, Karnavati Holdings, a subsidiary of the Ahmedabad-India-based Indian corporation Nirma Limited purchased Searles Valley Minerals from Sun Capital Partners for $200 million.
At present, Nirma’s operation in Trona specializes in chemical excavation catering to industrial, agricultural, automobile and other sectors, entailing the extraction and processing of boric acid, soda ash, salt cake, sodium carbonate, sodium sulfate and several specialty forms of borax and salt from Searles Lake.
In 2015, the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority, a joint powers authority involving the counties of San Bernardino, Kern and Inyo, the City of Ridgecrest, The Indian Wells Valley Water District was formed, taking as its charter a commitment to ensure a sustainable water supply for the region by overcoming the depletion of the groundwater basin and its aquifer which underlies 597 square miles and includes the northwest tip of San Bernardino County, the southwest tip of Inyo County and the northeast corner of Kern County. It undertook to put water use limitations on well owners and the major water users throughout the region. Those included imposing water use charges on entities throughout Indian Wells Valley that went beyond the amount allotted to them by the authority.
In September 2020, Searles Valley Minerals, represented by Eric Garner, Jeffrey Dunn and Maya Mouawad with the law firm of Best Best & Krieger, filed a lawsuit in Kern County Superior Court against the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority in an effort to protect what Garner, Dunn and Mouwad asserted are the company’s groundwater rights within the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Basin, and to stop the collection of what they characterized as an illegal and unfair groundwater replenishment fee and a tax disguised, they assert, as an “extraction fee.”
According to Garner, Dunn and Mouwad, “The authority’s ‘sustainable’ groundwater management plan is anything but sustainable – it’s a significant new burden on a select few groundwater users that will push many entirely out of operation without any regard to existing water rights.” The lawyers said the groundwater replenishment fee was unprecedented and exorbitant, and was increasing the company’s water costs by 7,000 percent or $6 million per year – pushing Searles Valley Minerals out of business.
Over the five years between 2020 and 2025, in large measure because of the increase in water costs, the number of employees at Searles Valley Minerals dropped from 700 to 545 employees.
According to the company, it is now letting another 300 go.
The company’s president and chief executive officer, Dennis Cruise, said, “This is a painful and deeply personal moment for our employees, their families and our community. We do not want to make these reductions, but we must take responsible action to ensure the long-term viability of the company.”
Equally challenging for the company is collusion between three of its major worldwide competitors – Shandong Haihua Company, Limited, Berun Group, and Tangshan Sanyou Chemical Company Limited – and the communist Chinese government. Shandong, Berun and Tangshan engage in so-called dumping. Dumping is a trading practice which takes place in the context of an international marketplace used to give a company a leg up or several legs up on its competitors that involves a company or country exporting products to a foreign market at a price lower than their domestic price or below the cost of production, with the intention of gaining market share. While dumping itself is a company-level action, it is frequently supported by government-backed subsidies—such as direct cash payments, tax credits, or low-interest loans—which allow the exporting firm to sustain losses while underpricing competitors in the target market. That is what is taking place with regard to Shandong’s, Berun’s and Tangshan’s sale of soda ash and boric acid.
Nirma is being battered to a pulp by the Chinese companies’ strategy of undercutting Searles Valley Minerals’ prices, the company said in a February 4 press release announcing the layoffs. The Chinese companies are selling their product, Nirma said, “at prices that California-based producers cannot reasonably match.”
Moreover the company is being eaten alive by California’s operating restrictions as pertain to the environment and energy purchases, such that energy purchases at present account for nearly half of the facility’s expenses, putting the company at a disadvantage to producers outside of California.
“Ongoing regulatory compliance costs, fees and taxes have further increased the cost of doing business, making it increasingly difficult for soda ash operations in California to remain economically viable,” according to the press release.
The company intends to up its borax mining efforts, it indicated. The U.S. Geological Survey in 2025 added borax to the nation’s list of critical minerals.
The company’s most valuable asset is one it has yet to tap into and which is being held in reserve. An element that is plentiful in Searles Dry Lake is lithium. Lithium is not currently being produced on a commercial scale from Searles Dry Lake for strategic reasons.
Searles Valley Minerals is continuing its mining of borax, soda ash, and salt cake from the dry lake but has at present deprioritized the extraction of lithium and potash due to a combination of economic, logistical, and technical factors.
The company is focusing waiting on harvesting borax, soda ash, and sodium sulfate, using a complex solution mining and evaporation process involving ponds which is optimized for those products. The extraction of lithium, which is present in lesser quantities than borax, soda ash and sodium sulfate, requires a separate, specialized chemical process. Lithium was identified as being present in the dry lake in the 19th century, but extracting it has not historically been economically viable. With the recent, rapid rise in lithium demand and prices, the company is yet waiting from a further escalation in its value before beginning a lithium extraction effort in earnest.
-Mark Gutglueck