Herald of Steel

Chapter 361 The Salt Market

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The traditional way the salt would be extracted was that the brine (seawater) coming out of the pipe in the wooden box would be collected, and then proteins such as egg white, blood, or some other additive be mixed with the brine.

This would be done to further refine the seawater and cause the remaining dirt and residues to coagulate so that they could be skimmed off.

Finally, this water would finally be taken to large, lead pans, or even wooden boards, and left to dry with the aid of sunlight and wind, until a somewhat pure salt could be produced.

Alexander's plan was to simply skip the boring evaporation stage, and directly boil off the brine in enormous boilers made from cast iron.

These 600-liter boilers would be needed to be boiled for 6 hours, and as the water level would start to go below the halfway mark, more seawater would be added to keep to water level high, while constantly heating and stirring the huge pot.

This constant addition of brine would go on for a whole week until the entire 600-liter pot would become completely filled with salt.

After achieving this step, the pot would be taken off the heat, and the resultant salt be allowed to cool and crystallize, netting Alexander around 1.2 tons of salt (salt is around twice as dense as water).

And to get this 1.2 tons of salt Alexander would need around 12 tons of concentrated brine which itself would come from around 400 tons of seawater with the average ocean salinity being around 3 percent.

And the number of briquettes that would be needed to create this salt would be around 2,000, or about 10 tons of coal, giving the technique a fuel cost of just 40 ropals for 1.2 tons of salt as 50 briquettes cost 1 ropal, or about 3 ropal per 100 kg.

Whereas if firewood was used that would have been 100 ropals per 100 kg.

Which was why nobody used it.

With the cost calculations complete, Alexander then went on to do the capacity production, and since it took around a week to collect the brine and another week to make the salt, making the production a two-week cycle, he simply divided his total coal supply for a fortnight with coal required per unit cycle.

So, with Alexander deciding to use half of the coal excavated for the briquette, it got him around 14,000 tons of coal or 3.5 million briquettes, capable of making 4000 tons of salt per month.

While producing around 5,000 new jobs, with most of them being the woodcutters Menicus had temporarily borrowed.

Alexander assumed a low price of 2 ropal per kilogram of salt to find that this plant would net Alexander annually a minimum of 96 million ropals, and introduce 48,000 tons of new salt to the market.

And this amount of money was based on the price of salt in Zanzan, which was on the low side because it was a major port city and the salt from Adhan could be easily transported to Agnirat and then easily transported by sea, significantly cutting down costs.

This meant that the price of salt inland could vary by up to five and in some remote locations even ten times.

This presented Alexander with a huge market to draw from as he made some reasonable estimates about the size of the salt market in Adhania.

From his experience of ruling Zanzan, and giving out generous amounts of salt to the populace, he found that an average peasant family of 8 people (the husband, wife, children, and the husband's parents) would need around 40kg of salt, or 5 kg per head.

This amount of salt was the entire annual demand for a peasant as almost the entirety of this quantity would be used to smoke meat, dry fish, and pickle vegetables in preparation for winter.

For example: curing a kilo of meat took roughly 100 g of salt while curing 1 kg of fish roughly took 250 to 350 g of salt.

And the amount of salt that would be used as seasoning or flavoring was minuscule in comparison and the peasants would get the vast majority of their bodily salt needs naturally from their diet of meat, fish, and vegetables, requiring them to buy at most about a kilo or two of salt per head per annum for consumption.

Hence with a population of an estimated 80 million, the annual need for salt was around 500,000 tons, with Alexander's new plant capable of meeting about 10% of it alone.

This was an enormous capacity for something that did not exist even a month ago, being rivaled only by a few other salt production centers of Adhania like Adhan and Kuleef, but with the production cost being only a fraction of theirs at 0.25 ropals per kilogram of salt.

With this price, Alexander was sure he would be able to under-price any salt in the market other than Adhan's, as the salt there was really effortless to collect.

But here Alexander had another advantage.

In the traditional salt pan method, naturally much dust, sand, and dirt would be blown onto the sand, an inevitability of the process.

But Alexander would be much purer because the boiling would be done indoors, and so it would not be contaminated by dust and debris that wind evaporation would inevitably bring.

He would also use large sieves when adding the brine to the boiling pot, managing to catch many types of dirt in the fine net.

Hence by quality, Alexander's salt quality was the finest in the world, pure white and with large clear crystals, a condiment worthy to grace a noble's table.

Alexander was sure he would be able to charge a premium for the product, maybe up to twenty times the regular amount.

Or even more given how many of Adhania's customs revolved around salt, such as how the importance of a guest was determined by how close or far away one was sat from the salt cellar.

And how intricate some of these salt cellars were, to the point they became an absurdity, used as status symbols in the circle of nobility.

But all these advantages did not necessarily mean that Alexander was stepping on Ptolomy's toes.

The salt market just in Adhania was big enough for both of them to co-exist comfortably.

Because even though 48,000 tons a year sounds like a lot, in the grand scheme of things it was really not.

For example, in Alexander's previous life, in the middle ages, just one single saltern in the Northern German city of Lüneburg produced 30,000 tons of salt per year!

A saltern was like one set of salt-producing pools, and a salt-producing city would have multiple such salterns.

But even this did not make the city the center of salt trade in Europe.

That distinction belonged to Venice.

And all of that had to be remembered along with the fact that Europre at that time had around 60 million people, a third less than Adhania.

So Alexander was free of increase significantly without any market restrictions, his only bottleneck- the supply of coal.

And this did trouble the pasha as he knew such easy surface coal would soon run out and he would have to dig deeper to exact the valuable rock.

And digging deeper would mean costs- multiple times the cost, a problem Alexander was unable to solve currently.

Speaking of costs, the major portion of the cost in salt selling came in the form of transportation costs.

Ships were still okay, but the cost of transferring salt inland through non-existent roads in small, merchant carts drove up the prices madly, largely erasing Alexander's advantage in lower production cost.

And this was something Alexander would not be able to mitigate for the time being.

Alexander did not know the exact circumstances of roads in Zanzan, but relying on his experience, he was confident in saying that they would likely range from abysmal to non-existent.

And it would take a long time for him to fix these, both because of manpower and material constraints and because the lands did not belong to him yet.

And the last part was problematic not just for Alexander's authority, but because these nobles would be able to put heavy tariffs and even arbitrarily stop and seize any of Alexander's products traveling through their land, stifling his trade.

And given that all the pashas were enforcing a semi-embargo on him currently, it meant that a large part of the salt market was cut off from him.

While Ptolomy for once in his life was in a much better position to capitalize off of this, as his family had spent generations building a huge road network throughout the province of Adhan, designed to quickly and efficiently distribute the royal family's salt.

And because of this, Alexander was of two minds on how to sell his salt.

One was that he would sell most of the salt in bulk to Ptolomy or Farzah.

And then these men could use their vast trade network to distribute it to all over the country.

Or, the second option was that he could export his salt outside of Adhania.

Both had their pros and cons, and Alexander was in flux on which to choose.

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