Author: richardhands

Ammonia markets saw a slow start to 2025, with further transparency needed on both sides of the Suez to determine the extent to which prices are expected to fall through January amid healthy supply and only limited pockets of demand.

High energy storage costs for renewable-based technologies are likely to make European long term carbon prices considerably higher than their present levels.

A foundation laying ceremony attended by Qatar’s Deputy Amir Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad Al Thani has been held at Qafco’s new blue ammonia facility at Mesaieed Industrial City on Qatar’s east coast. The plant, which is scheduled to be completed in 4Q 2026, will be the largest blue ammonia facility in the world. Speaking at the ceremony, energy minister Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi said the facility will have a capacity of 1.2 million t/a, along with CO2 injection and storage facilities with a capacity of 1.5 million t/a. QatarEnergy will also provide the new plant with more than 35 MW of electricity from the solar power plant currently being built in Mesaieed. Completion of the complex will see Qatar become the world’s largest exporter of urea, producing 12.4 million t/a, according to Qafco.

Prices in most markets should register declines through January, though the extent to which benchmarks will ease is yet unclear. Chinese suppliers have seen significant price declines in recent weeks.

Carbon Recycling International (CRI), which operates a geothermally powered green methanol plant at Svartsengi, 40km southwest of Reykjavik, had to evacuate its site in late November when a 3km fissure opened in the earth a few kilometres away and lava began spilling across adjacent land. Satellite photos of the area taken on November 24 show a large field of molten and cooled lava to the north, west, and south of Svartsengi, though the plant itself remained undamaged. CRI’s Iceland facility runs on CO2 , water, and renewable electricity from the Svartsengi geothermal power station. CRI says the low-carbon energy source allows it to produce 4,000 t/a of methanol with a greenhouse gas footprint just 10–20% that of conventional methanol.

The International Fertilizer Association (IFA) elected four new board members to its Board of Directors during the organisation’s Strategic General Meeting in London in November. The new board members are: Fahad Al-Battar, SABIC Agri-Nutrients Company; Youssef El Bari, OCP Nutricrops; Ahmed El-Hoshy, Fertiglobe plc; and Marc Hechler, EuroChem Group AG. The Strategic General Meeting also re-elected Marcos Sabelli, CEO of Profertil Agro for the second term.

Expensive feedstock, overseas competition and tightening environmental regulations all pose potential threats to Europe’s nitrogen industry.

A complete list of all articles and news items appearing in Nitrogen+Syngas magazine during 2024.

While there is still a considerable push for use of biomass waste as a lower carbon feedstock for chemical production via gasification to syngas, biological processes such as fermentation are increasingly gaining traction as an alternative.

Nitrogen+Syngas went to press just a few days before Donald Trump’s swearing-in as the next president of the United States. While it is sometimes difficult to sort the truth from the hyperbole in his public pronouncements, nevertheless, if taken at face value, they would seem to indicate that we may be in for a turbulent four years in commodity markets in particular. While he is an avowed military non-interventionist, on the economic policy side he has emerged as a firm believer in the power of tariffs to alter markets in the favour of the US, and has promised 20% tariffs on all goods entering the US, potentially rising to 25% for Canada and Mexico, and 60% for his particular bugbear, China, sparking a scramble for wholesalers to stock up in the last few weeks of the Biden presidency. Trump previously raised tariffs on Chinese goods entering the US to 20% during his first term, and the Biden administration made no attempt to reverse this, and even added some additional ones, for example 20% on Russian and Moroccan phosphate imports.