Sodium Nitrate - Sources

Sources

The largest accumulations of naturally occurring sodium nitrate are found in Chile and Peru, where nitrate salts are bound within mineral deposits called caliche ore. For more than a century, the world supply of the compound was mined almost exclusively from the Atacama desert in northern Chile until, at the turn of the 20th century, German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch developed a process for producing ammonia from the atmosphere on an industrial scale (see Haber process). With the onset of World War I, Germany began converting ammonia from this process into a synthetic Chilean saltpeter which was as practical as the natural compound in production of gunpowder and other munitions. By the 1940s, this conversion process resulted in a dramatic decline in demand for sodium nitrate procured from natural sources.

Chile still has the largest reserves of caliche, with active mines in such locations as Pedro de Valdivia, María Elena and Pampa Blanca, and there it used to be called white gold. Sodium nitrate, potassium nitrate, sodium sulfate and iodine are all obtained by the processing of caliche. The former Chilean saltpeter mining communities of Humberstone and Santa Laura were declared Unesco World Heritage sites in 2005.

Sodium nitrate is also synthesized industrially by neutralizing nitric acid with soda ash

2 HNO₃ + Na₂CO₃ → 2 NaNO₃ + H₂O + CO₂

or by mixing stoichiometric amounts of ammonium nitrate and sodium hydroxide or sodium bicarbonate.

NH₄NO₃ + NaOH → NaNO₃ + NH₄OH

NH₄NO₃ + NaHCO₃ → NaNO₃ + NH₄HCO₃