Section: CRUNS Market & Features

Nitrogen-rich wastewaters remain a major issue for fertilizer and other industries. Saipem’s new electrochemical technology, SPELL, is an important step towards the overall objective of zero industrial pollution. A complete engineering review of the technology, its alignment with all international applicable standards, and optimisation has now been concluded and the technology is ready for deployment for the removal of ammonium nitrogen from industrial waters and wastewaters. Saipem discusses the key features of SPELL and reports on the first two industrial references.

Soaring natural gas prices in Europe, up to five times higher than normal, have led to numerous economic shutdowns of ammonia capacity across the continent. This has coincided with shutdowns in the US due to hurricane season, reducing availability considerably and driving up prices in the western hemisphere.

Market Insight courtesy of Argus Media

The ammonium nitrate explosion in Beirut in August 2020 has once again focused minds upon the potential risks associated with the chemical.

Venkat Pattabathula, a member of the AIChE Ammonia Safety Committee, reports on the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ Safety in Ammonia Plants and Related Facilities Symposium, held virtually on 30 August to 2 September 2021.

The first half of 2021 has been characterised by tight supply in the ammonia market, exacerbated by plant outages in Europe, Trinidad, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia. At the same time, higher spot demand has fuelled significant price increases in both the eastern and western hemispheres. Low inventories and reduced export availability in the Far East forced Indian phosphate producers and industrial consumers of ammonia to source product from other locations.

Arun Murugan and Mike Antony of FITIRI and Venkat Pattabathula of SVP Chemical Plant Services discuss the COORS Analytics system for more accurate prediction of the performance of a CO 2 removal system.

Johnson Matthey’s latest methanol synthesis catalyst, KATALCO™ 51-102, was introduced in 2018 to offer improved catalyst stability and therefore higher end-of-life activity and extended lifetimes than conventional methanol synthesis catalysts. Since launch, KATALCO 51-102 has been successfully installed in two methanol plants and a third is planned for later in the year. In this article Johnson Matthey provides an update on the proven performance of KATALCO 51-102 during lab and pilot scale testing as well as in customer plants. The application of catalysts made using the KATALCO 51-102 technology for methanol synthesis via new ‘green’ routes, such as using captured and purified CO2 in conjunction with ‘green’ hydrogen, is also discussed.

Although the stranded gas boom that led to the construction of the region’s nitrogen capacity in the 1980s-2000s may be largely over, the Middle East remains the largest nitrogen exporting region in the world.

Johnson Matthey and MyRechemical have formed an alliance to commercially develop waste to methanol technology. In this article, two different approaches to waste disposal and chemical production are analysed: a post combustion scenario with waste incineration and hydrogenation of the CO2 recovered from flue gas to produce methanol, and a precombustion approach with waste gasification followed by conversion of synthesis gas into methanol.