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View search results on mapPhosphate mining stops a few miles east of Tampa Bay and the City of Tampa, but the handling and processing of phosphates occurs around the shore, especially at Mosaic’s Riverview Facility on Tampa Bay. The plant is similar to the two operating in the Bone Valley, a few miles east, and every year produces 800,000 tons of phosphoric acid and 1.6 million tons of processed phosphate from phosphate rock extracted in the valley.
The largest phosphate production region in the USA is the Bone Valley, of central Florida, and the historic center is the town of Mulberry, thirty miles east of Tampa, where mining companies have supported the creation of a phosphate mining museum. The galleries are inside old railroad cars, and have colorful displays about the industry.
Phosphate ore processed at beneficiation plants at the mine sites in the area is moved by rail and pipeline to production plants, one of which is Mosaic’s Bartow facility. The initial material produced at Mosaic’s plants is phosphoric acid, which is created by combining processed phosphate rock with sulfuric acid. Sulfur for creating sulfuric acid comes to the plants by rail or truck from oil refineries, where it is an abundant byproduct.
The former Royster Mine is another former Bone Valley phosphate mine site that is being maintained and partially redeveloped. It is immediately adjacent to the town of Mulberry.
The Bonnie Mine and Plant was a major phosphate site closed in 1999, and is now primarily an environmental monitoring location for the former plant site and waste ponds. Mosaic has leased parts of the old plant site to other companies to use as a storage terminal for bulk materials associated with mining and fertilizer activity.
Mosaic’s New Wales Plant, near the town of Lithia, is the larger of two fertilizer production plants currently operating in the Bone Valley, producing nearly 3 million tons of processed phosphates, and 1.4 million tons of phosphoric acid per year. When phosphate rich ore is mixed with sulfuric acid to make phosphoric acid, it produces phosphogypsum as a byproduct, which is piled high at these plants in a waste mound known as a gypstack.
Mosaic shut down its South Pierce Plant in 2006. Like the others in the area, it produced phosphoric acid, and remains as a potential resource, to reopen or use for parts, and as a remediation and environmental monitoring site, for decades to come. Bone Valley has dozens of permanently closed phosphate operations, many of which are part of Mosaic’s assets and responsibility.
Mosaic’s Lonesome Mine has been closed for a while, with active mining moving south and east to the Four Corners Mine. The landscape remains churned up in the mining areas of Fort Lonesome. Former phosphate mines can be found westward towards Tampa, with increasing amounts redeveloped into housing areas.
Mosaic’s Four Corners Mine is currently the largest of the active phosphate mines in the Bone Valley. It produces around 6.5 million tons of phosphate rock (out of a total of 15 million tons produced by the company globally). The mine covers 12,000 acres, and employs around 500 people. Mosaic has around 20 draglines in the area, and is using 8 of them at the Four Corners mine. The company says they are the largest earth-moving machines on the planet.
Mosaic’s South Fort Meade Mine is currently the second largest of Mosiac’s mines in the Bone Valley, producing around 4.5 million tons of phosphate rock per year. The first step in the mining process is to dig trenches and berms around the immediate area to be mined, so that some of the groundwater drains into the perimeter ditch, keeping the mining area from becoming more of a mud puddle than it already is.
Mosaic’s South Pasture Mine is the third largest of its four active mines in the Bone Valley, producing around 2.8 million tons per year. It is one of a few phosphate mines and plants that Mosaic acquired from CF Industries in 2014, when CF sold its phosphate and potash facilities, to focus on nitrogen.
The fourth active Bone Valley mine, Mosaic’s Wingate Creek Mine, produces around 1.4 million tons of phosphate rock per year. Unlike the others, the Wingate mine has been allowed to flood, and Mosaic uses dredges to remove overburden and mine the ore. Mosaic owns almost 300,000 acres in the valley, and leases the rest of what it needs.
Next to the site of the former FMC plant in Pocatello is the Don Plant, a large functioning phosphate plant operated by Simplot, with a growing black gypstack behind it. The plant has been operating since 1944, when it was the first fertilizer production facility built by the J.R. Simplot company. Much larger now, it produces more than a million tons a year of phosphate fertilizers, feed phosphates, and industrial products, and employs around 350 people.
The Blackfoot Bridge Mine is a recently opened mine in the Permian-age sea bed deposit known as the Phosphoria Formation, in southeastern Idaho. While not as large as the phosphate operations in Florida, more than thirty mines have been worked here over the last century, and today there are a half dozen or so active mines. Blackfoot Bridge was opened by Monsanto, which has mined the area for many years in order to supply its phosphate plant in Soda Springs.
The Smoky Canyon Mine, in southeast Idaho, next to the border of Wyoming, supplies Simplot’s Don Plant in Pocatello with the 1.7 million tons of phosphate ore it consumes annually, to make phosphate fertilizers. The mine was developed in the mid-1980s and has a beneficiation plant on site, which refines and grinds the ore into a powder.
The Uncle Sam facility was originally owned by Freeport Chemical Co., and then by IMC Global, when that company was merged with Cargill’s crop nutrition division to form Mosaic in 2004. Like other phosphate fertilizer production sites, the Uncle Sam plant has a phosphogypsum stack, more than a square mile in size, behind the plant.
The Mosaic Company’s Faustina Plant in Louisiana is one of the largest ammonia plants in the country. It produces ammonia for ammonium phosphate fertilizers (the P of NPK), and is fed by a stream of phosphoric acid which comes to it, via pipeline, from another Mosaic plant across the river. Mosaic’s Faustina Plant is next to CF’s Nitrogen Donaldsonville Complex, the largest production site for nitrogen in the USA.
A few companies dominate the nitrogen fertilizer production industry in the USA, but none more than CF Industries. Though the company has several plants around the country, CF’s Nitrogen Production Complex in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, is by far the largest nitrogen plant in the USA.
When Nutrien came into existence in 2018, taking over the assets of PotashCorp, Nutrien acquired this combined phosphate and nitrogen fertilizer complex in Geismar, Louisiana. It is located in a chemical complex on the Mississippi River, sharing the site with an Innophos phosphate chemical plant, Honeywell Specialty Materials, and Nova Chemicals, with a phosphorous gypstack at the back of the complex.
Nutrien Limited is the second largest nitrogen fertilizer producer in the USA (after CF Industries). Nutrien’s nitrogen facility at Marston, Missouri is more of a blending, storage, and distribution terminal than a plant. It is located on the Mississippi River, next to an ADM terminal, across from the border between Tennessee and Kentucky.
The Eddy Potash mine and plant has been abandoned and closed for some time. Under the plant, around 1,000 feet down, are several square miles of mined room and pillar space. This mine is connected to three other underground mines that collectively cover nearly 50 square miles of excavated room and pillar space. The Eddy Mine was bought by Intrepid Potash in 2004, and these empty spaces are now part of their HB Solution Mine operation.
Intrepid’s North Mine site is used as a compaction plant and a final processing and storage location, for granular muriate of potash from the HB solution mine and mill. Before that, the North Mine site was an active underground potash mine for many years, started in 1956 by the National Potash Company. Intrepid bought the plant and mine in 2004, when it acquired the potash assets of the Mississippi Chemical Company.
This set of evaporation ponds covering a square mile was built a few years ago by Intrepid Potash, as part of a new potash mining operation known as the HB Solar Solution Mine, a hydraulic mining operation. The evaporation ponds hold water that has been pumped through flooded underground mines, dissolving ore from the walls and pillars, to settle and dry out here. After a year or so the dried residue is scraped up and processed into potash fertilizer.
Located a few miles up the road from Mosaic’s massive phosphate mine and plant is Intrepid’s West Mine facility. Intrepid, based in Denver, is the only US company dedicated solely to producing potash in the USA, and produces more than anyone else, from two mines in New Mexico and two in Utah. The West Mine, opened in 1931 by the American Potash Company, was the first potash mine in the region.
Intrepid’s East Mine is an underground potash mine started by Kerr McGee in 1965. It was part of Mississippi Chemical’s operations when it was purchased by Intrepid in 2004. The East Mine is the largest of the underground mines in the area now owned by Intrepid. Around 25 square miles of room and pillar space has been excavated, and connect both the North and the West Mines.
This is one of three active mines in the Carlsbad Basin, in the southeast corner of New Mexico, that together produce 80% of the potash in the USA. This plant and mine complex was operated for decades by IMC Global, which is now owned by Mosaic. Based in suburban Minneapolis, Mosaic, the largest US-based producer of phosphates, is also the largest US-based producer of potash.
Nutrien is the new owner of PotashCorp’s phosphate mine and plant in Aurora, North Carolina. Not as vast as the company’s northern Florida site, the operation here, measuring 6 miles by 6 miles, is large enough to be called the largest integrated phosphate mining and chemical plant in the nation, since it has just one plant, surrounded by its mines and waste ponds and piles.
A few companies dominate the nitrogen fertilizer production industry in the USA, but none more than CF Industries. CF Industries operates several significant nitrogen production facilities in the USA, including the Verdigris Nitrogen Plant, in Oklahoma, located on a natural gas pipeline and an ammonia pipeline in an inland port near Tulsa.
The Compass Minerals Company has a pipeline that removes water from the Great Salt Lake’s remote and salty northern arm, and pumps it into evaporation ponds next to the lake, in an area known as Clyman Bay. After the heat and dry air of the region further concentrates the water in this pond, it is released into a canal heading east into the lake, to feed a potash fertilizer plant.
This canal, called the Behrens Trench, was built in 1991 by the Great Salt Lake Minerals and Chemicals Company, which operated the salt and potash plant on the lake at that time. Moving liquid brine inside a liquid lake, it is unique in the nation, if not the world. The canal continues across the lake, underwater, cut into the lake bottom, and continuously sloping downwards, as it heads eastward.