Business View - October 2015 79
Courtois, in 1811. It’s name comes from the Greek word,
ioeides, which means violet - the color of iodine vapor,
although under standard conditions, iodine is bluish-
black solid with a metallic luster. It is a relatively rare ele-
ment - ranked 47th out of 60th in abundance. 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 elsewhere, only
two sources are useful commercially: the caliche, a sedi-
mentary rock, found in Chile, and the iodine-containing
brines of gas and oil fields, especially in Japan and the
United States.
In fact, the first iodine production in the United States oc-
curred when it was harvested from seaweed off the coast
of California between 1917 and 1921. Some years lat-
er, the first commercial production of iodine came from
brine pools in the state of Louisiana. Getting iodine from
brine is how Deepwater Chemicals, itself, got started,
when, in 1931, the original company, Deepwater Iodides,
began recovering iodine from the brine associated with
the oil and gas drilling operations in the Long Beach area
on California’s southern coast. “The company survived
as an iodine producer for many, many years,” says Pa-
mela Curry, Deepwater’s Sales Manager. “And then in
the 1970s, it started making derivatives.” Much of the
Deepwater Iodides’ 50 different iodine-based chemicals
went into animal feed and other commodity products: po-
tassium iodide for use in photographic film and nylon tire
AT A GLANCE
WHO:
Deepwater Chemicals, Inc.
WHAT:
Leading manufacturer of iodine-based spe-
cialty chemicals
WHERE:
Woodward, Oklahoma
WEBSITE
:
MANUFACTURING
