80 Business View - October 2015
cord; tincture of iodine for treating minor
wounds; and silver iodide for cloud seeding
to cause rain.
In the early 1990s, Deepwater Iodides
moved to Oklahoma to be closer to another
source of iodine, far away from California’s
Orange County and closer to IOCHEM, one
of the state’s leading iodine producers, and,
today, one of Deepwater’s sister compa-
nies. “There’s a large brine reservoir in the
area,” says Wachnowsky. “It’s basically an
underground reservoir of iodine-rich brine.”
That would be the Woodward Trench, which
begins about 7,000 feet below the surface
and helps define the town of Woodward as
the “iodine capital of America” because of
the extremely high concentration of iodine
in its interstitial brine water. In fact, today,
most iodine production in the United States
comes from the iodine-rich, natural brines
on the northern flank of the Anadarko Basin
in northwestern Oklahoma.
When Deepwater Iodides moved east, it
also tweaked its business model. “We no
longer made a lot of the commodity prod-
ucts that went into animal feed and we
concentrated more on niche industries in
our product line” says Curry. Today, Deep-
water Chemicals is a wholly-owned subsid-
iary of the Toyota Tsusho Corporation and
is a leading producer of iodine derivatives
for domestic and export markets. “Our cus-
tomers are located all over the world,” says
Wachnowsky, “but we primarily do business
in North America and Asia.”
Deepwater has a 44,000 square foot, state-
of-the-art facility, including offices, labora-
MANUFACTURING
