Magazine: 393 Jan-Feb 2025

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.

Toyo Engineering Corporation has developed two new digital solutions, MethaMaster™ and MethaDynamics™ , which enhance the operational efficiency of e-methanol production from variable renewable energy.

The production of urea, a critical component in the fertilizer industry, involves highly corrosive environments, particularly in the high-pressure sections of the process. This necessitates the use of advanced materials that can withstand such aggressive conditions to ensure long life and efficiency of urea production plants. Alleima, Stamicarbon, Saipem and TOYO report on their advanced material and equipment solutions for the urea industry.

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.