Compass Minerals | North American Salt Company
North American Salt Company provides salt and other minerals to customers throughout the United States. Our products include mined rock salt for highway and consumer deicing and high-grade branded and private label mineral products for home and business uses. NASC is a key company of Compass Minerals, the largest salt producer in North America and the United Kingdom, and is a world-wide leader in the minerals and specialty fertilizer business.
Company details
Find locations served, office locations
- Business Type:
- Manufacturer
- Industry Type:
- Minerals
- Market Focus:
- Globally (various continents)
About Us
Compass Minerals provides salt and other minerals to customers throughout the United States. Our products include mined rock salt for highway and consumer deicing and high-grade branded and private label mineral products for home and professional uses.
Headquartered in Overland Park, Kansas, Compass Minerals is the largest salt producer in North America and the United Kingdom, and is a world-wide leader in the minerals and specialty fertilizer business.
How We Produce
We produce salt and other minerals through three methods:
Mining
We mine rock salt using a drill-and-blast mining technique in deep salt deposits. We start by cutting into the rock salt face using specialized equipment. We then drill holes into the face and use explosives to break the salt into small pieces. Diesel-powered front-end loaders and trucks load and haul the salt to a crusher where it is reduced in size, loaded onto a conveyor belt and transported to a mill. At the mill the salt is crushed further and screened to the required sizes before being hoisted to the surface.
Our rock salt mines are located underground, as deep as 1,800 feet below the surface. We extract salt from each mine in rectangular 'room' sections, leaving behind vast “pillars” of salt to support the mine structure.
Mechanical Evaporation
Our high-efficiency processes yield the high-purity salt used for food and many other applications. We begin by injecting water into an underground salt deposit to create saturated brine. The brine is drawn out and evaporated in a series of large crystallizers. As the water evaporates, salt crystals grow. The crystals are then washed to remove impurities. In the final phases, salt is passed through a filter-dryer and then on to a processing area. The end result is a high-purity, crystallized salt.
Solar Evaporation
Solar evaporation is the oldest and most energy-efficient method of mineral production.
At the Great Salt Lake in Utah, we draw highly saline waters from the lake's most remote areas into very shallow solar evaporation ponds. The sun naturally evaporates the water in these ponds over a three-year span, leaving beds of naturally occurring crystallized minerals.
We gather these minerals, cleanse and process them to produce our all-natural products.
About Salt
Salt, or sodium chloride, occurs naturally all over the Earth, and it has even been found in meteors and on Mars.
The Earth’s ocean water is 2.7 percent salt, and huge underground deposits of solid salt are located in many locations around the world. There is so much salt found underground and in saline waters that the supply is almost inexhaustible. In fact, geologists estimate that salt from the United States alone could provide all the salt the world needs for the next 100,000 years.
Safely getting the salt out of the earth and cost-effectively converting it into useful products is the challenge.
About Magnesium Chloride
Magnesium chloride(MgCl2) occurs naturally in the ocean and in some ancient sea beds around the world. In North America, it has been found in the brine of the Great Salt Lake. We harvest magnesium chloride there, using only the sun, wind and gravity, at our environmentally friendly solar evaporation plant.
Magnesium chloride is a high quality, economical product for low temperature deicing. It’s a critical tool for safe, effective winter road maintenance, and is trusted by transportation professionals to combat even the most severe winter storms. When highways are treacherous, magnesium chloride can help prevent the ice bond, allowing snow plows to clear the roads more efficiently.
It is also the best deicer for sidewalks, driveways, and parking lots, because it is less corrosive and gentle on concrete and vegetation. Its pet-safe characteristics make it ideal for home ice melting use.
Magnesium chloride also is a commonly used gravel stabilizer and dust suppressant. Its hygroscopic properties draw water from the night air, keeping the surface slightly damp and minimizing unhealthy fugitive dust. Whether it’s keeping unpaved roads visible and safe, or reducing road maintenance costs, magnesium chloride is the work horse of unpaved road maintenance.
We offer magnesium chloride in both liquid and solid formulations.
About Compass Minerals
Compass Minerals is a leading supplier of highway deicing products, helping to keep roadways safe in the U.S., Canada and the United Kingdom. It provides high-quality food salt, water care products, packaged deicing, minerals for animal nutrition, and other salt and mineral products to consumers and industry throughout North America. Its organic-approved sulfate of potash specialty fertilizer helps produce nutritious fruits, vegetables, tree nuts and other important crops in North America, South America and areas of the Pacific Rim. And, it provides secure records management services to businesses in the U.K.
Though its history stretches back as far as 1844, Compass Minerals became a public company following our initial public offering in December 2003. Its stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CMP.