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For today sapropel production is carried out on Lake Puchai, in the Tukalinky area, which is 130 kilometres away from the city Omsk. In the middle of the steppe landscape there are small islands of black, as though burnt, earth, which spring softly under the feet. These are sedimentation basins, where sapropel is dried. When mealy and pleasant to touch it is ready for the next technological stage – it is ready to be frozen for a year, which provides the quality of the raw stock, that is its friability, and precedes the profound processing, and then the delivery to production facilities. When sapropel, being some jelly-like mass, has just been taken out of water, it is unfit for any usage because of the protoxide compound excesses. Not far from the place a black spurt of water with sapropel excretes out of a slurry pipeline. It is injected with a suction-tube dredge from the bottom of Lake Punchai.
This basin of 100 hectares area does not differ from any other ordinary one in view, but the smooth surface of the lake is deceptive. The most part of the lake bottom is covered with a thick layer of sludge, which annually increases from 4 till 5 centimeters (that from 500-1000 tons). It is generated of algae and the numerous water living creatures, moribund by the end of the warm period. And the rain streams bring pit-run fines and clay. In some decades the Punchai could have turned into a swamp with the mire up to several metres deep. After a year of sapropel production the water in the lake leveled up from 50 centimeters to 30 metres. Hereby the sapropel producers at the same time function as environmentalists. Clearing the lake of sludge, they give access to subterranean springs, which supply the basin and the lake gradually restores its former status of a natural reserve of clean fresh water.
Every year 20-25 thousand tons of sedimentations are pumped out from the bottom of the Punchai. Such pace gives the company an opportunity to work effectively for at least ten years. Standing idles cannot threaten it as well: there are 200 lakes in the Omsk area. The majority of these lakes are under the threat of shallowing. Sapropel stocks in them are estimated to 150-170 million tons (that is 75 % of the explored sapropel stocks in Western Siberia).
