“I have a dream” is how Pascal Bandelier from Novacarb opened a presentation recently at the Worldwide Soda Ash Conference in London, UK.
He was only slightly tongue in cheek. The real point that lay behind the presentation was to aspire to a different relationship with major soda ash customers with regards to pricing and the costs behind soda ash production.
Novacarb, part of the Novacap Group, produces soda ash from its facility at La Madeleine, Nancy in France. The company also extracts limestone and salt which are key raw materials for soda ash, and produces sodium bicarbonate.
Soda ash production in Europe is synthetic, manufactured by the Solvay method, and as such is beholden in many ways to energy markets. Gas and coal are used to produce steam, and also power generation for the plant. Other important variables include currency fluctuations which have a strong...