Category: Policy & Regulation

Digitalisation brings with it a fresh set of issues as well as opportunities for safety management.

Graham Roeber, CEO, Orono Spectral Solutions, looks at how to test the oil content limit in anhydrous ammonia specifications.

Russia's sulphur supply is under renewed pressure after another Ukrainian strike hit the Astrakhan gas processing plant, a facility vital to the country's fertilizer industry and responsible for over 60% of its sulphur output.

The Indian government is considering a new financial relief package for its domestic fertilizer industry aimed at protecting its agricultural sector from volatile global markets, according to a Department of Fertilizers (DoF) document dated 14 August. The proposal directly addresses the impact of the "West Asia crisis" on key raw material costs.

Brazil's Federal Senate on 11 August approved the final text of the Profert bill (PL 699/2023), which will release up to BRL 10 billion ($1.85 billion) in tax-credit subsidies over five years to build new fertilizer plants or expand and modernise existing ones.

Germany's chemical industry association VCI has warned that continued low water on the Rhine and other inland waterways could force chemical companies to cut production, as Berlin publicly acknowledged the freight squeeze and put a relaxation of the Sunday lorry driving ban up for review.

Rail, road, ship or pipelines all bring different benefits and risks to long distance transport of ammonia, but the fundamentals of ammonia safety remain a constant.

Members of the lower house in Chile’s Congress have unanimously approved creation of a special investigative commission to examine a series of alleged irregularities at state-owned copper producer Codelco. The issues are: overestimation of production by almost 27,000 t last year; a multimillion-dollar renovation of the company’s headquarters in Santiago; and, maybe, the collapse of a chimney at Potrerillos copper smelter in the Atacama region of northern Chile. The structural failure has forced a production suspension.

While there has been a focus on switching to low carbon hydrogen feeds, many options exist to decarbonise refineries, including energy efficiency, carbon capture and changing to bio-feedstocks.

VK Arora of Kinetics Process Improvements (KPI) compares the delivered-cost competitiveness of blue ammonia from regions including the US Gulf Coast, Western Canada, Atlantic Canada, the Middle East, Indonesia, and Malaysia into Japan, the European Union, and South Korea.