Bromine production in the United States

Previously, bromine was also recovered from sea water, either directly or from the bittern produced during solar salt operations.

After halite (rock salt) precipitates, the remaining brine, called bittern, contains about 2,700 ppm bromine.

The high-bromine brines in the Appalachian Basin are found in Silurian and Devonian rocks, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia.

The principal source of the brine in Ohio and West Virginia was the Pottsville Formation, also called the Big Salt Sand.

By the late 1900s, production had shifted to the Filer Sandstone of the Detroit River Group, of Devonian age, with bromine concentrations of about 2,600 ppm.

The brine is believed to have migrated into the Smackover from the underlying Louann Salt, through the intervening Norphlet Formation.

The result of thousands of years of evaporation are the sediments below the present lake bed, which include two salt layers, and brine with high concentrations of bromine, along with potassium, sodium and boron.

[5] US production of bromine began on a small scale in 1846, at the salt works at Freeport, Pennsylvania.

In the 1920s, three companies operated chemical plants on the shore of the lakebed, and learned how to commercially produce lithium, phosphate, borax, soda ash, sodium sulfate.

Another solar salt operation on San Diego Bay also started extracting bromine in 1926; the plant closed in 1945.

A joint venture between Ethyl and Dow Chemical started a direct from sea water plant at Kure Beach, North Carolina in 1933.

Dow found a better permanent location at Freeport, Texas, where a seawater extraction plant started in 1940, and a second in 1943.