Suwanee River Chemical Plant, Florida

The eastern portion of Nutrien’s phosphate operations in northern Florida surround the White Springs Suwanee River Chemical Plant. The company uses large draglines to remove overburden and dig out the ore, which is sent by slurry pipes to screening and sorting plants, then to production plants where sulfuric acid turns it into phosphoric acid and then into dry phosphate fertilizer products. The construction of the plants at White Springs, and most of the mining, was conducted by the Occidental Petroleum Corporation of Los Angeles, which started phosphate mining here in the 1960s. PotashCorp bought the operation in 1995, and in 2018 ownership changed when Nutrien was formed by the merger of the PotashCorp and Agrium. One of two adjacent plants, mines, and gypstacks in northern Florida. Though they are large operations, the majority of the phosphate production in the USA is conducted east of Tampa, in an area known as the Bone Valley.