Industrial & De-icing Rock Salt

Bulk solar and rock salt for de-icing and chlor-alkali

Industrial salt is the largest-volume commodity nobody prices carefully, because the cargo is worth less than the ship that carries it. Solar salt harvested from evaporation pans and rock salt mined from halite beds both trade on the same short sheet: sodium chloride 96–99.5% on a dry basis, moisture (2–5% for solar, under 1% for rock), insolubles, calcium and magnesium (which matter for chlor-alkali brine purity and set the membrane-cell grade apart from de-icing grade), sulphate, and a size distribution that decides whether it spreads from a gritter or dissolves in a saturator at rate. De-icing buyers, the municipalities and highway authorities of Canada, the northern United States and northern Europe, want a coarse 2–10 mm product with an anti-caking additive and accept lower purity; chlor-alkali plants want 99% plus with calcium and magnesium under a few hundred ppm, and pay for it. UN Comtrade 2025 declarations show the scale: India exported 19.5 million MT under HS 2501, half of it to China and a fifth to Korea, at an average USD 17–20 per MT FOB; Morocco exported 494,000 MT, 44% to the USA and 39% to Canada at USD 19–38; and Canada imported 1.31 million MT, from Mexico 470,000 MT, Brazil 310,000 MT, Chile 305,000 MT and Morocco 192,000 MT. Egypt reports its salt exports by value only, with the USA among its partners.

At USD 15–40 per MT FOB the freight is one to two times the cargo, so an industrial salt enquiry is a freight enquiry wearing a cargo's clothes, and the winner is whoever fixes the ship best: a Supramax or Panamax on a contract of affreightment for the de-icing season, loading at 8,000–15,000 MT a day from a stockpile with a conveyor or grab, discharging into a port stockpile before the first frost. CBIL is a commodity brokerage company and brokers industrial salt from Indian, Mexican, Chilean, Moroccan, Egyptian and Australian producers and trader positions against SGS or Intertek certification of NaCl, moisture, insolubles, calcium, magnesium, sulphate and sizing, on FOB, CFR and CIF terms; because CBIL also runs a chartering desk (LaycanDesk), the annual freight contract is priced with the cargo rather than left to the buyer, which for this commodity is most of the delivered price. Send the grade (de-icing or chemical), the monthly tonnage and window, the discharge port and its stockpile arrangement, and we will work the producer and the tonnage together.

Need the ship as well? Our chartering desk prices chemical parcel tanker chartering on LaycanDesk.