Round up days 2 and 3 CRU Nitrogen+Syngas ExpoConference

Days 2 and 3 of the CRU’s 38th Nitrogen+Syngas 2025 Expoconference turned to the technical sessions, organised in three parallel streams covering: green ammonia technology, nitric acid and ammonium nitrate, plant operations and reliability, urea technology, digitalisation, carbon capture, emissions reduction and sustainable fertilizer production, and fertilizer finishing. As always the conference and exhibition provided a great forum for those involved in the industry to catch up on the latest developments, with thought-provoking papers and good audience participation.

While it’s impossible to mention all of the 40 excellent technical presentations, some of the highlights included;

Several licensors looked at ways of tuning plant operations to cope with fluctuating power from renewable sources, including modeling and plant control programs presented by thyssenkrupp on the ammonia side and Toyo Engineering Company on the methanol side, while Casale considered the impact of varying pressure and temperature on mechanical stresses in the plant.

Linde and Yara gave an overview of their work on adding a green hydrogen feed to Yara’s Porsgrunn ammonia plant in Norway, providing some real world experience of the challenges involved.

Great interest was generated by Technip Energie’s solutions for low-carbon hydrogen which includes ROX, a cutting edge solution for clean hydrogen production, achieving up to 99% CO₂ with maximum efficiency.

Ammonia cracking continued to be a topic of interest, with a good turnout for Unicat’s presentation on its new ACTS catalyst based on its established Magcat spherical support base, designed for a tubular fired reactor, with 75-96% hydrogen efficiency, depending on the main cracker heating source. Michael Lutz and Laurent Prost of Air Liquide also presented their company’s low risk approach to developing an ammonia cracking technology, now at the pilot plant stage, and examined the issue of nitriding of construction materials due to high temperature hydrogen attack.

Andrea Zambiano of Saipem discussed the potential issues with large scale ammonia storage worldwide, once the use of low carbon ammonia becomes more widespread, particularly as a hydrogen carrier, and Sapiem’s own gravity-based terminalling solution, based on their own experience in designing large LNG tanks.

Stamicarbon in collaboration with Curtiss-Wright has developed a special mechanical plug made of Safurex® for urea applications which has been successfully installed in a pool condenser for the first time.

BASF has developed a new methanol catalyst specially optimised for the synthesis of e-methanol from CO₂-rich feedstocks under dynamic operating conditions.

Another new catalyst development by BASF presented at the conference was its 3D printed catalyst X3D® secondary N₂O abatement catalyst for nitric acid plants, which has demonstrated significant economic and environmental savings by reducing blower energy requirements and improving operational efficiency.

Manuel Prohaska of MPC² provided an update on the latest improvements to non-destructive test methods enabling quick and reliable on-site assessment of critical process equipment at the manufacturer’s workshop and the end-user’s plant.

Klemens Wawrzinek of Linde presented an interesting case study which showed that the optimum carbon capture rate for large scale ammonia plants based on ATR is not 99+% but may be closer to 95% if plant design is focused on carbon intensity rather than carbon capture. Maximising carbon capture only may lead to over-engineered flow sheets, which will not bring benefits with respect to the carbon intensity of the final product.

And as usual several operators shared their real world experiences of plant operation, issues encountered and how they were tackled, including Engro Fertilizers, Indorama Eleme, Pusri, OQbi, MOPCO, Fauji Fertilizers, Helwan, Yara and PT Petrokemija Gresik

We look forward to seeing everyone again next year when we return to Barcelona 10-12 February 2026.