Business View Magazine - November 2016

Business View Magazine - November 2016 151 Today, the major uses of organic iodine compounds are as: catalysts; disinfectants; food supplements; stabilizers; dyes, colorants, and pigments; medicines and pharmaceuticals; and various uses in analytical chemistry. Inorganic iodides find specialized applica- tions – silver iodide is not only a major ingredient of photographic film, it is used to seed clouds to induce rain. Radioactive isotopes of iodine are used to treat thyroid cancer. Iodine is found on Earth mainly as the highly water- soluble iodide: ion I-, which concentrates in oceans and brine pools. Of the several places in which iodine occurs, only two sources are useful commercially: the caliche, a sedimentary rock, found in Chile, and the iodine-containing brines of gas and oil fields, espe- cially in Japan and the United States. The first iodine production in the United States occurred when it was harvested from seaweed off the coast of California be- tween 1917 and 1921. Getting iodine from brine is how Deepwater Chemi- cals, itself, got started. In 1931, the original company, Deepwater Iodides, began recovering iodine from the brine associated with the oil and gas drilling opera- tions in the Long Beach area on California’s southern coast. In the 1970s, the company started making io- dine derivatives - 50 different iodine-based chemicals went into animal feed and other commodity products. In the early 1990’s, Deepwater Iodides moved to Okla- homa to be nearer to the Morrow Formation, an un- AT A GLANCE WHO: Deepwater Chemicals, Inc. WHAT: Leading manufacturer of iodine-based spe- cialty chemicals WHERE: Woodward, Oklahoma WEBSITE : www.deepwaterchemicals.com