Section: CRUNS Market & Features

In spite of nearly two years of western sanctions, Russian exports of nitrogen fertilizer have recovered almost to pre-war levels, while high prices led to record earnings in 2022.

As Europe struggles to move away from its previous dependence on imported Russian natural gas, prices have been high and volatile, with a corresponding catastrophic impact upon domestic ammonia production.

Market Insight courtesy of Argus Media

Casale presents different scenarios based on energy availability for the integration of an existing ammonia facility with green hydrogen to supplement or replace the grey ammonia production with green ammonia.

While producing ammonia with hydrogen from electrolysis remains expensive, large scale lower carbon ammonia has focused on carbon capture and storage from existing plants, so-called ‘blue’ ammonia. But exactly how green is blue?

TOYO has a long history in urea granulation technologies and has recently added two new technologies to its product line-up.

With the current focus on decarbonising ammonia production, Johnson Matthey explains the important role of high activity ammonia synthesis catalyst in the production of green ammonia.

Merchant markets for ammonia have faced considerable disruption in recent years due to the covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

Tampa ammonia contract prices increased dramatically during September, from $395/tonne c.fr to $575/ tonne c.fr. The main culprit was plant outages and reduced production at several plants in the region. The tight supply situation was exacerbated by a delay to the restart of Ma’aden’s 1.1 million t/a ammonia plant in Saudi Arabia.

Ballestra is taking a new approach to improving nutrient use efficiency by moving methylene-urea production to the fertilizer industry. Massimo Gori and Svet Valkov of Ballestra discuss the technology and benefits of having a slow-release fertilizer that uses a product from within the fertilizer industry.