As we approach the 2019-2020 Winter, many thoughts should begin to turn toward raw material supplies of winter deicers. This is a good time to try to understand some of the dynamic forces that can affect supply and pricing of commodity products like road salt. In over 40 years of winter product supply experience, I’ve […]
Read More »Salt Addiction America is addicted to salt and it’s a growing problem with no easy answers. We’re not talking about food salt. This is deicing salt addiction. According to various sources, globally we consume about 80 million tons of road salt per year. Of that, the United States consumes about 25 percent in a heavy […]
Read More »Where’s The Salt? Regional supply and price challenges grow in road salt supply for the preseason 2018-19. While there is plenty of salt on this blue marble in space that we all live on, road salt availability in certain regions is showing early signs of supply and price problems as we enter the preseason this […]
Read More »Winter 2017-18 arrived late much like the past few winters. While many regions experienced significant and prolonged cold in December and early January, no appreciable amounts of snow in the population centers came during that cold stretch. While most apply salt during any snow event irrespective of whether it is truly needed or not, the […]
Read More »It is fall and the last week of September 2017 as I write this. Temperatures in many parts of the US snow belt this week have been in the 80s and 90s. How is that possible? An active hurricane season has caught the attention of many in the snow forecasting business. After 40 plus years […]
Read More »Contractor’s Market “Nothing is as easy as it looks” the weather prognosticators lament after last year’s abysmally missed winter forecasts. All the experts called for another brutal winter and it was anything but brutal. So, what does that mean for deicing products in North America? It means that the market is long and it’s a […]
Read More »Here we go again “Here we go again” That phrase can apply to a lot of things in life; positive things, negative things, but it always implies that it’s something with which you are familiar. So when I open this edition of my State of the Salt Address with that phrase, you know it’s not […]
Read More »THE PERFECT STORM – An industry still recovering As Yogi Berra famously said; “it ain’t over until it’s over”. With regards to the painful salt and premium deicer supply shortages that began last December, they are not over. On-going challenging resupply scenarios continue to impact the market and those who have been complacent will […]
Read More »Saltpocolypse 2013/2014 – What happened? For the past four decades of my professional life, I’ve been involved in the production and distribution of winter deicing chemicals. In the 70s, we brought in rail cars upon rail cars of packaged products over the summer months because we knew that the seasonality of demand meant that what […]
Read More »We are pleased to share this May 28, 2013 article from Forbes website which echoes our view on Global Warming and sunspots; a subject you will find in nearly every state of the salt address we’ve published since our beginning. The science is coming together that strongly indicates that the last act of global warming […]
Read More »The winter of 2011/2012 proved to be the warmest winter on record for the US and Canada and the fallout of that weather event will ripple through the salt and deicing industry for at least a couple of years. The sole exception was Alaska who saw record snowfalls and cold. SALT There is a general […]
Read More »I’m a follower of the book Super Freakonomics (the sequel to Freakonomics) which is a book about economic trends based on common sense observations. This installment of my State of the Salt Newsletter contains my view of common sense observations as they relate to the deicing market and deicer supply lines. As always, I try […]
Read More »It has been a year since I last published a State of the Salt Address, however, changes in the market, changes in global supply positions, and the weather are all factors I’d like to talk about in this installment of my market newsletter. As always, this newsletter is filled with hyperlinks of my reference sources […]
Read More »In this month’s newsletter, we will update some of that information. Like previous newsletters, we provide dozens of links to the data and we openly share with you how we interpret this information. You can look at the same tea leaves as we do and decide if you see it the same way or not.
Read More »Things have not changed in a positive way and deicer inventories are not sufficient to meet demand on a National scale. The US market is still well over 2MM tons short on highway salt. Packaged deicers seem to be in deeper trouble and shortages in premium deicers are now reality as we predicted.
Read More »In a nutshell, we still read the information pretty much the same as we did in September; deicer inventories are not sufficient to meet demand on a National scale. The US market is still well over 2MM tons short on highway salt. OK, so that’s the bad news. The good news is that those of us who are located along the Atlantic seaboard are not anywhere nearly as hard hit by this as those customers in the Midwest and Central United States.
Read More »As we began the 2008/2009 deicer season, early signs of trouble began to emerge: state bids and contracts were getting across-the-board “no bid” on deicer requirements; the private and contractor markets were told there was no deicer available for them for the coming season and that they needed to make alternate arrangements – even in places where long term relationships were in place; and the largest and most significant factor being that bid prices on salt bids were doubling, then tripling, and then even going higher.
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