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This is the story of the economic shockwave currently running through this country – along supply chains, into the prices of the materials and services we use every day.
It is the story of how an energy crisis very quickly turns into an everything price rise.
It’s hard to know where to begin, so let’s begin at the very beginning of one of those supply chains.
Let’s begin with one of the most basic materials of all: salt. Most of Britain’s salt comes out of the ground in Cheshire, from a slab of halite – rock salt – hundreds of metres beneath the ground.
Water is pumped down, along with compressed air, and what comes back up is brine – water with a salt concentrate of just over 30%.
So far this hasn’t taken much in the way of extra energy costs, but just wait. Because having been extracted, that brine is then pumped over to British Salt’s main plant in Middlewich. Here, it is purified and treated in giant vats with lime and other substances which remove impurities like magnesium and sulphates.
Then, that pure brine is pumped into a massive evaporation plant, where it is heated up in vast vessels, not once or twice but, six times. The vessels are highly pressurised and very hot.
By the time the salt has been through them, it has lost most of its water and has the texture of wet sand.
Then it goes through yet another drying process which removes the final three per cent of moisture. Finally, you have the finished product: pure vacuum dried salt, or as we call it, table salt.
It’s worth noting all these stages not merely because it might comes a surprise that most of the salt we consume comes to you this way, but also because it is very energy intensive.
By far the biggest cost for British Salt is energy, to power the gigantic gas-fired boilers they have which provide heat and electricity to the plant.
‘We don’t have a magic wand’
In the long run it’s possible that we might come up with electric boilers capable of doing what the ones here at…
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Source : skynews
