Category: Outlook & Reviews

We profile the US ‘big three’ North American phosphate producers, Mosaic, Nutrien and Simplot, and disruptive market entrant Itafos.

Nitrogen+Syngas’s annual listing of new ammonia, urea, nitric acid and ammonium nitrate plants shows that the key areas for new project developments are Egypt, India, Nigeria and Russia.

The Sulphur Institute is holding its annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois this year from April 20th-22nd.

This year appears to be determined to illustrate the limitations of forecasting. Projecting trend lines into the future, looking at expected completion dates for major projects and global economic projections are all worthwhile activities, and can provide valuable insights for business people, but any prediction is apt to be derailed by what one of our prime ministers supposedly once described airily as; “events, dear boy, events.”

Although North America is no longer the world’s largest sulphur exporter, it remains a major producer and consumer, and there are still significant exports and imports of sulphur into and out of the region.

Claira Lloyd, Sulphur Editor and Sulphur Fertilizers Team Leader, Argus Media, assesses price trends and the market outlook for sulphur.

Kuwait is in the middle of a major overhaul and expansion of its refining capacity, as well as boosting LPG output and sour gas processing.

Middle East supply will return to normal at the start of the second quarter with bottlenecks in the UAE and maintenance in Saudi Arabia at an end. But this is unlikely to result in lower Middle East f.o.b. prices until the second half of April, if not early May. This is because buyers who found it hard to find March loading cargoes will snap up any April product as soon as it’s made available.

Now in its second year, SulGas 2020, South Asia’s only conference on gas treating and sulphur recovery, took place 3-4 February 2020 at the Novotel – Juhu Beach, in Juhu, Mumbai, India.

What a difference two months can make. When I came to write the editorial for the January/February issue, the talk was all about climate change and sustainable production in the wake of Australia’s bushfire crisis, but these days there appears to be only one story that it is obsessing the world, and that of course is the Covid19 pandemic. The focus of concern has pivoted in recent days and weeks away from China and east Asia, which seem – hopefully – to have weathered the worst of the storm so far, and across to Europe and North America, where some difficult weeks and perhaps months clearly lie ahead.