Searles Valley Minerals

Searles Valley Minerals Inc. is a raw materials mining and production company based in Overland Park, Kansas. It is owned by the Indian company Nirma. It has major operations in the Searles Valley and in Trona, California where it is the town's largest employer. The company produces borax, boric acid, soda ash, salt cake and salt. It also owns the Trona Railway.

The Trona facility extracts and ships 1.75 million tons of chemicals per year.

Searles Valley Minerals Inc. is part of Climate VISION (Voluntary Innovative Sector Initiatives: Opportunities Now), a public/private partnership which is seeking to reduce US industry greenhouse gas emissions by 18 percent between 2002 and 2012. As it operates on government owned land, Searles Valley Minerals Inc. pays royalties of millions of dollars each year to both the federal and state governments. Much of those royalties cover the expenses of local school districts.

The mining, production, and assets of the present day Searles Valley Minerals Inc. have a long and varied history.

When John Searles arrived in the area in the 1860s, he was looking for gold and silver to mine. Instead he found a white crystalline powder, borax, in the dry Searles Lake bed. In 1873 he went into production as the San Bernardino Borax Mining Company to mine borax. Long mule teams were used to haul borax in wagons to San Pedro, until the much closer settlement of Mojave was used after the Southern Pacific Railroad reached it in 1876.

In 1895 The San Bernardino Borax Mining Company was sold by Searles to the Pacific Coast Borax Company, owned by Francis "Borax King" Smith. He shut down production at the company's section of Searles Lake the next year.

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