Potash in the context of Salt (chemistry)

Mining is the extraction of valuable geological materials and minerals from the surface of the Earth. Mining is required to obtain most materials that cannot be grown through agricultural processes, or feasibly created artificially in a laboratory or factory. Ores recovered by mining include metals, coal, oil shale, gemstones, limestone, chalk, dimension stone, rock salt, potash, gravel, and clay. The ore must be a rock or mineral that contains a valuable constituent, can be extracted or mined and sold for profit. Mining in a wider sense includes extraction of any non-renewable resource such as petroleum, natural gas, or even water.

Modern mining processes involve prospecting for ore bodies, analysis of the profit potential of a proposed mine, extraction of the desired materials, and final reclamation or restoration of the land after the mine is closed. Mining materials are often obtained from ore bodies, lodes, veins, seams, reefs, or placer deposits. The exploitation of these deposits for raw materials is dependent on investment, labor, energy, refining, and transportation cost.

Potassium is a chemical element; it has symbol K (from Neo-Latin kalium) and atomic number 19. It is a silvery white metal that is soft enough to easily cut with a knife. Potassium metal reacts rapidly with atmospheric oxygen to form flaky white potassium peroxide in only seconds of exposure. It was first isolated from potash, the ashes of plants, from which its name derives. In the periodic table, potassium is one of the alkali metals, all of which have a single valence electron in the outer electron shell, which is easily removed to create an ion with a positive charge (which combines with anions to form salts). In nature, potassium occurs only in ionic salts. Elemental potassium reacts vigorously with water, generating sufficient heat to ignite hydrogen emitted in the reaction, and burning with a lilac-colored flame. It is found dissolved in seawater (which is 0.04% potassium by weight), and occurs in many minerals such as orthoclase, a common constituent of granites and other igneous rocks.

Potassium is chemically very similar to sodium, the previous element in group 1 of the periodic table. They have a similar first ionization energy, which allows for each atom to give up its sole outer electron. It was first suggested in 1702 that they were distinct elements that combine with the same anions to make similar salts, which was demonstrated in 1807 when elemental potassium was first isolated via electrolysis. Naturally occurring potassium is composed of three isotopes, of which
K is radioactive. Traces of
K are found in all potassium, and it is the most common radioisotope in the human body.

Lead glass, commonly called crystal, is a variety of glass in which lead replaces the calcium content of a typical potash glass. Lead glass typically contains 18–40% (by mass) lead(II) oxide (PbO); modern lead crystal or leaded crystal, historically also known as flint glass for the original silica source, contains a minimum of 24% PbO. Lead glass is desirable for a variety of uses due to its clarity. In marketing terms it is often called crystal glass.

The term lead crystal is, technically, not an accurate way to describe lead glass, because glass lacks a crystalline structure and is instead an amorphous solid. The use of the term remains popular for historical and commercial reasons but is sometimes changed to simply crystal because of lead's reputation as a toxic substance. It is retained from the Venetian word cristallo to describe the rock crystal (quartz) imitated by Murano glassmakers. This naming convention has been maintained to the present day to describe decorative holloware.

In metallurgy, a flux is a chemical reducing agent, flowing agent, or purifying agent. Fluxes may have more than one function at a time. They are used in both extractive metallurgy and metal joining. They are named for the ability to make molten metals easier to flow during smelting.

Some of the earliest known fluxes were sodium carbonate, potash, charcoal, coke, borax, lime, lead sulfide and certain minerals containing phosphorus. Iron ore was also used as a flux in the smelting of copper. These agents served various functions, the simplest being a reducing agent, which prevented oxides from forming on the surface of the molten metal, while others absorbed impurities into slag, which could be scraped off molten metal.

Sodium carbonate (also known as washing soda, soda ash, sal soda, and soda crystals) is the inorganic compound with the formula Na₂CO₃ and its various hydrates. All forms are white, odorless, water-soluble salts that yield alkaline solutions in water. Historically, it was extracted from the ashes of plants grown in sodium-rich soils, and because the ashes of these sodium-rich plants were noticeably different from ashes of wood (once used to produce potash), sodium carbonate became known as "soda ash". It is produced in large quantities from sodium chloride and limestone by the Solvay process, as well as by carbonating sodium hydroxide which is made using the chloralkali process.

The Port of Saint John is a port complex that occupies 141 hectares (350 acres) of land along 3,900 m (12,800 ft) of waterfront of the Saint John Harbour at the mouth of the Saint John River in the city of Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. The Port of Saint John, with facilities on both sides of the river, is noted for its extreme tidal range and river currents. Because of the semi-diurnal tides and the river influence, slack water occurs at approximately half tide and not at high or low water as at most other ports.

The port is administered by the Saint John Port Authority, a federal agency. Major products shipped through the port include oil, forest products and potash. Container traffic has been steadily increasing since 2016 with DP World becoming the port operator and Canadian Pacific regaining access to the port in 2020 through the purchase of Central Maine and Quebec Railway. The port of Saint John has three container lines servicing it those being MSC, CMA CGM Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd.

Cargill, Incorporated is an American multinational food corporation based in Minnetonka, Minnesota, and incorporated in Wilmington, Delaware. Founded in 1865 by William Wallace Cargill, it is the largest privately held company in the United States in terms of revenue.

Some of Cargill's major businesses are trading, purchasing and distributing grain and other agricultural commodities, such as palm oil; trading in energy, steel and transport; raising livestock and production of feed; and producing food ingredients such as starch and glucose syrup, vegetable oils and fats for application in ultra-processed foods and industrial use. Cargill also has a large financial services arm, which manages financial risks in the commodity markets for the company. In 2003, it split off a portion of its financial operations into Black River Asset Management, a hedge fund with about $10 billion of assets and liabilities. It previously owned two-thirds of the shares of The Mosaic Company (sold off in 2011), a producer and marketer of concentrated phosphate and potash crop nutrients.

Potassium is the main intracellular ion for all types of cells, while having a major role in maintenance of fluid and electrolyte balance. Potassium is necessary for the function of all living cells and is thus present in all plant and animal tissues. It is found in especially high concentrations within plant cells, and in a mixed diet, it is most highly concentrated in fruits. The high concentration of potassium in plants, associated with comparatively very low amounts of sodium there, historically resulted in potassium first being isolated from the ashes of plants (potash), which in turn gave the element its modern name. The high concentration of potassium in plants means that heavy crop production rapidly depletes soils of potassium, and agricultural fertilizers consume 93% of the potassium chemical production of the modern world economy.

The functions of potassium and sodium in living organisms are quite different. Animals, in particular, employ sodium and potassium differentially to generate electrical potentials in animal cells, especially in nervous tissue. Potassium depletion in animals, including humans, results in various neurological dysfunctions. Characteristic concentrations of potassium in model organisms are: 30–300 mM in E. coli, 300 mM in budding yeast, 100 mM in mammalian cell and 4 mM in blood plasma.

Underground soft-rock mining is a group of underground mining techniques used to extract coal, oil shale, potash, and other minerals or geological materials from sedimentary ("soft") rocks. Because deposits in sedimentary rocks are commonly layered and relatively less hard, the mining methods used differ from those used to mine deposits in igneous or metamorphic rocks (see underground hard-rock mining). Underground mining techniques also differ greatly from those of surface mining.

Sylvinite is a sedimentary rock made of a mechanical mixture of the minerals sylvite (KCl, or potassium chloride) and halite (NaCl, or sodium chloride). Sylvinite is the most important source for the production of potash in North America, Russia and the UK. Most Canadian operations mine sylvinite with proportions of approximately 31% KCl and 66% NaCl with the balance being insoluble clays, anhydrite and in some locations carnallite. Other deposits of sylvinite are located in Belarus, Brazil, France, Germany, Kazakhstan, Slovakia and Spain.

The Williston Basin is a large intracratonic sedimentary basin in eastern Montana, western North Dakota, South Dakota, southern Saskatchewan, and south-western Manitoba that is known for its rich deposits of petroleum and potash. The basin is a geologic structural basin but not a topographic depression; it is transected by the Missouri River. The oval-shaped depression extends approximately 475 miles (764 km) north-south and 300 miles (480 km) east-west.

The Williston Basin lies above an ancient Precambrian geologic basement feature, the Trans-Hudson Orogenic Belt that developed in this area about 1.8-1.9 billion years ago, and that created a weak zone that later led to sagging to produce the basin. The Precambrian basement rocks in the center of the basin beneath the city of Williston, North Dakota lie about 16,000 feet (4,900 m) below the surface.

ANFO, also written as AN/FO (an acronym for ammonium nitrate/fuel oil; /ˈænfoʊ/ AN-foh) is a widely used bulk industrial high explosive. It consists of 94% porous prilled ammonium nitrate (NH₄NO₃) (AN), which acts as the oxidizing agent and absorbent for the fuel, and 6% number 2 fuel oil (FO) (road diesel).

The use of ANFO originated in the 1950s. It is highly insensitive as an explosive, requiring a quantity of secondary explosive, known as a primer or a booster (larger than a standard blasting cap), in order to be detonated.