GREEN RIVER — West Soda LLC hosted an open house in Green River Wednesday evening to educate the public on its new greenfield soda ash project in Southwest Wyoming called Project West.
The project offers a new solution trona mine and soda ash processing facility, of which there will be no underground miners. Project West is composed of a Soda Ash Processing Plant, located near Granger, and a Solution Mining Area, located approximately 16 miles southeast of the processing plant.
“We’re sitting on a reserve,” Oğuz Erkan, CEO/President of West Soda LLC, told SweetwaterNOW. He said that not only will they be able to access the “deepest and purest” form of soda ash, but they are accessing 20 to 30 million tons of soda ash that “can’t come from anywhere else but Green River”.
The trona in Sweetwater County is in demand nationally and globally, Erkan said, and worldwide competitors don’t have access to the natural trona. Countries such as China and Russia are producing synthetic trona, which Erkan explained is not only harmful to the environment, but is costly to make, and therefore increases prices of soda ash products.
Therefore, Erkan views this project as “a win-win-win.” It’s a win for the public who will benefit with jobs, a win for the local governments who will be able to apply for impact funds, and a win for investors. Not only will Project West add approximately 1,200 jobs to Wyoming’s economy during the peak of construction, but they anticipate that the project will add around 300 permanent positions for long-term operations of the plant.
Economic Impact
According to West Soda, the construction and operation of the Project West facility will provide significant new and long-term investments in the local community. Along with the 1,200 jobs during construction and 300 permanent positions, which includes site management, mine field workers, maintenance, engineers, administration and more, Barron pointed out that when industries like mining expand, it has a ripple effect in the community. With all the new positions involved in this project, it will also unintentionally create more jobs in the local services industry.
During construction, Project West will generate over $104 million in local sales and use taxes, and approximately $327 million in property taxes over the life of the project. The fact sheet states that the mining of trona will result in approximately $465 million in mineral severance and production taxes over a 30-year period, or $15 million annually.
Additionally, the total capital cost of the project is about $2.6 billion, and over $84 million in local material purchases. This estimated cost of material purchases is the important one when determining possible impact funds from the state to local communities.
Impact Assistance
Alan Edwards, Deputy Director/Administrator of the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) Industrial Siting Division, told SweetwaterNOW that local governments will have a 90-day period between when the Industrial Siting Application is submitted by West Soda to the hearing with the Industrial Siting Council in which they can make requests for impact funds.
“Unmitigated impacts have to be directly caused by the project, and so they’re requested in advance. So it has a predictive speculative element to it,” Christoper Toalson, Economist with the Wyoming DEQIndustrial Siting Division, said. “However, if there’s an existing maintenance issue, that would not be related to a project so that’s not a project related impact, so that can’t be requested for.”
Edwards said the way that impact assistance works is there are different categories, one being infrastructure such as water, sewer, or roads that are needed for a project such as Project West. Another category would be increases impact on emergency medical services (EMS) during the construction of the project when the workforce is present in the community.
If an impacted community needs to add an extension on their sewer and water to serve the influx of workers due to the project, Edwards explained, those can be considered for impact funds.
“We work with the communities, the ones that will work with us, to help them identify those [impacts],” Edwards said. “And then once construction starts, any impact assistance that the Council has awarded starts to flow to the local governments to cover that type of impact.”
Toalson said that projects are required to tell the Industrial Siting Division what their construction costs are so they can determine their jurisdictionality, as well as the estimated materials cost, of which the sales and use tax funds the impact assistance. The impact assistance available to communities is derived from the estimated materials cost. Toalson explained that since Project West’s estimated materials cost is $84 million, up to 2.76 percent of that can be used for impact assistance.
“That’s the maximum that’s available,” Edwards clarified. “What [local governments] get is what they request and what the council determines is a legitimate unmitigated impact.”
Edwards said the impact assistance is based upon the sales and use tax from materials cost, which then goes into the general fund, so the impact assistance funds that are approved come from the state’s general fund.
“It tries to strike a balance because the funding comes because the project is being built, but the impacts are there because the project is potentially being done,” he said.
Edwards said he and Toalson can provide advisement to the communities to figure out what impacts to include in their requests, so he hoped local governments would utilize his department before submitting requests to the Industrial Siting Council.
“We would like to see the project succeed, we don’t want to be a hindrance,” Edwards said. “We’re here, we want to help.”
Solution Mining Process
Unlike traditional mines that have miners underground, Project West will have an above ground four-step production process that includes filtration, crystallization, separation, and drying. Solution mining involves the recovery of trona by the injection and circulation of fluid underground.
“The injection fluid is hot water with a small amount of soda ash and caustic soda dissolved in the water,” which is known as ‘injection solution’, the project description states. That injection fluid dissolves the sodium minerals to form a brine solution made up of sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate, or soda ash and baking soda.
According to Jeff Barron, Professional Engineer and Civil Department Manager for WWC Engineering, the mining sites will have caverns that are approximately 600 feet wide and 2,300 feet underground. A pipeline from the processing plant will haul the injection solution to the mining area where the injection solution will melt down the trona into the brine, and will then be pumped to the surface and then to the Soda Ash Processing Plant.
After cooling, the processed soda ash and baking soda will be shipped via railroad.
Additionally, Erkan pointed out that Project West will have limited impact on the land because they will mine one site at a time, and once they mine that site for seven to eight years, the zoning of that land will go back to Agriculture.
Project Timeline
Permitting is currently underway for the project, with the submittal of an Industrial Siting Application to the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality, Industrial Siting Division planned for January 2024. The public hearing will then take place around April 2024.
If approved by the Industrial Siting Division, the construction of the project will start in January 2025 and full commercial operation will start in January 2027.
Another open house is scheduled to take place in Rock Springs Thursday at the Holiday Inn patio room from 4-7 p.m. For more information on Project West, visit their website at projectwest.com.
