Germany Still Ships Your Potassium Carbonate at Twice the Price
US imports of potassium carbonate from Germany fell from 4,244 tonnes in 2021 to 638 last year, while the whole line only fell 6.9 percent. The German tonnes that stayed now clear customs at $2.53 a kilogram against Korea's $1.28, and Korea plus Taiwan are 82 percent of everything that lands.
In February 2018 AkzoNobel and Evonik said they had started up a chlor-alkali plant together at Ibbenbüren, built on membrane electrolysis and rated at up to 120,000 tonnes a year of potassium hydroxide plus 75,000 tonnes of chlorine. Evonik took the KOH to market and converted part of it at Lülsdorf into potassium carbonate, potassium bicarbonate and potassium formate.
Three years after that start-up, Germany was 24.1% of every tonne of potassium carbonate the United States imported.
Last year it was 3.9%.
"Where did 3,600 tonnes of German potassium carbonate go, and who is shipping it now?"
The Cheap Half Left in 2022
We pulled HS 2836.40 out of Comtrade this run, one annual call per year back to 2019, reporter 842, imports. German tonnes run 4,486.5, 3,211.5 and 4,244.2 through 2021, then 1,587.7 in 2022, then 680.2, 715.7 and 638.1.
That is a fall of 85.0% off the 2021 base, or 3,606 tonnes gone.
The whole line barely noticed. Total US imports went from 17,589.6 tonnes in 2021 to 16,377.4 last year, down 6.9%, so this was substitution and not demand (chart below).
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