What makes salt from a depth of 1,000 meters so valuable

Raw materials What makes salt from a depth of 1,000 meters so valuable As of: October 31, 2026 • 5:21 p.m

A mining company from Hesse controls around 30 percent of the world market for high-purity pharmaceutical salts. What is mined there is essential to the survival of many people.

Everyone knows about infusion solutions; millions of them are used around the world every day. On the plastic bag there are abbreviations such as NaCl for sodium chloride or KCl for potassium chloride. What few people know: The salt for many of these vital medical products comes from East Hesse; the mining company K+S extracts the raw material from a depth of around 1,000 meters.

“The importance that K+S plays here is very important,” says Stefanie Navabi, who is responsible for the pharmaceutical sector as Senior Marketing Manager at K+S. "If you look at sodium chloride and potassium chloride together, K+S is actually the world's largest manufacturer of these pharmaceutical salts."

mex: Valuable raw material - What makes salt so important Christof Dörr, HR, Das Erste, October 7th, 2026 • 8:15 p.m. From coarse raw salt to a medical product What is mined at a depth of around 1,000 meters is still far from being suitable for the human body. A team of 38 employees ensures that foreign minerals such as magnesium, rock salt and clay are completely removed in a highly complex, energy-intensive process. The result: a product that has a purity of up to 99.9 percent.

Every day they produce around 95 tons of high-purity salt, which is sold to South America, the USA, the Pacific region, Asia and India. K+S has a special position, especially when it comes to potassium chloride, because there are very few mining areas in the world. In Europe they are the only manufacturer of high-purity pharmaceutical salts.

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“The pharmaceutical salts are definitely systemically relevant because each of us has come into contact with them at some point, for example during an infusion or a vaccination,” says Stefanie Navabi, who for this reason would also like to see a different awareness of the product. “It is extremely important that supplies are ensured, because a failure would be a major problem for all of us.”

She could imagine that salt would be added to the list of critical raw materials set by the European Union. There are currently 34 raw materials on this list, for example lithium, copper, cobalt and rare earths. There is no salt to be found on it. Rudolf Pietschnig sees the debate as differentiated. For the chemistry professor from the University of Kassel, sodium is too abundant worldwide to be a critical raw material.

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He sees it differently with potassium salt, which is extremely rare. “The potassium salts are essential, for example as fertilizer in agriculture, and we can count ourselves lucky that we have this resource here in such good quality,” says Pietschnig. "This is comparatively rare in the world, and that means it results in collateral damage if we have problems in the raw material chain." Classification as a critical raw material would increase the political importance of salt production and enable access to subsidies and accelerated approval procedures.

In addition to the product, the importance of the processing system is crucial for the expert. He advocates for a different way of dealing with it: "Purification is of course energy-intensive, and because of this fundamental importance, you should make sure that something like this doesn't migrate, because that is essential."

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However, the plant in Hesse is currently struggling with location disadvantages. In addition to high energy prices, a global bureaucratic patchwork is paralyzing business. Approval processes that take decades are the norm. “Of course we are not exactly favored when it comes to energy prices in Germany,” says Stefanie Navabi.

But the biggest challenge is the various certifications and registrations. In order to be able to use pharmaceutical salts, they must be approved by the relevant authorities in the USA, Germany or Europe. The many regulatory requirements vary from country to country, and the effort for the company is correspondingly high.

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Scientist Pietschnig believes that the importance of high-purity salts will become even greater in the future - for example in battery research. "There is a lot of research going on to replace the much rarer and more expensive lithium with sodium. I could imagine that sodium batteries could be an alternative in the near future, and that would then be a new, important field of application."

If sodium-ion batteries establish themselves as a real alternative for electric cars or stationary power storage, Germany already has a location advantage. The infrastructure and know-how to purify the raw material would already exist in Hesse. It is now up to politicians to ensure that this key industry does not move abroad due to bureaucracy and energy costs. If this were successful, security of supply in Germany would not be at risk, at least in this area.

This topic in the program: hr | mex - the market magazine | Oct 7, 2026 | 8:15 p.m