II.—Non-German Sources of Potash

Extract

It is scarcely necessary in this Magazine to insist upon the vital importance of potash, or upon the reasons which led to the former economic dependence of our own and many other countries on German resources. The shortage of potash, which arose as a direct consequence of the outbreak of war, became more and more accentuated until the latter part of 1917, when production from various revived and newly discovered sources began appreciably to relieve the then seriously acute position. In 1913, the last complete year of the older conditions, over £900,000 worth of potassium salts were imported from Germany by Great Britain, against imports of only half that value—much of which was cream-of-tartar, a byproduct of the wine industry—from all other countries. It is now safe to say that the German monopoly is completely broken, partly because of the return of Alsace to France, and partly because of the discovery of new deposits, and the successful development, under the stimulus of war conditions, of new methods of potash recovery from sources formerly unremunerative or unsuspected. The purpose of this article is to pass briefly in review the chief sources from which potash is, or may be, profitably extracted, other than those of the famous German deposits, which already have a voluminous and familiar, or at least readily accessible, literature.