Brazil’s agricultural industry continues to expand at the same time that most of its nitrogen fertilizer industry has shut down. Meanwhile, Venezuela continues to deal with the consequences of years of underinvestment and mismanagement, and elsewhere, gas discoveries in other parts of the continent have not led to the new plant construction boom that had once been hoped for.
The steam methane reformer is at the heart of most world-scale synthesis gas plants for ammonia, methanol or hydrogen production, and its optimum performance will maximise plant production and efficiency. This article studies the wide variety of parameters that need to be considered if a steam methane reformer is optimised.
After two turbulent years, could the fertilizer market finally start to stabilise in 2023? Well, that’s what Dutch agricultural finance house Rabobank is predicting…
Market Insight courtesy of Argus Media. Urea: The market remained weak at the start of the year with urea prices falling as producers fought for liquidity. Egyptian product fell by $40/t to $495/t f.o.b. in a matter of days, while f.o.b. prices in the Middle East and southeast Asia similarly fell to around $440/t. Urea prices in many end-user markets also slumped: US prices fell over the course of the first week of January by $30/t, Brazil by $15/t and many European markets by around $20/t.
CRU Events will host the 2023 Nitrogen + Syngas conference and exhibition at the Hyatt Regency Barcelona Tower in Barcelona, 6-8 March.
A review of the current slate of plans for green and blue ammonia production.
With Europe facing a long-term shortage of natural gas, and Russia looking east for new customers, how will changing global gas markets affect production of key syngas-based chemicals?
The past year has been a difficult, even disastrous one for Europe’s fertilizer producers. High natural gas prices have kept plants shuttered, with 70% of the continent’s ammonia production shut down at times. It remains uncertain how much of this will return to production this year, or indeed ever.
Ammonia prices registered another week of losses at the start of January, with supply options continuing to outweigh demand in most regions. Prices have been falling steadily for the past twelve weeks, as the market rebalances after production curtailments across Europe for much of 2022. Steady falls in gas pricing over the past few weeks have put production costs firmly below today’s import price, with European production now scheduled to ramp up at many plants this month.
Due to the inherent nature of the renewable power, sizing eSyngas plants powered with renewable energy brings complexity normally not faced by natural gas-based facilities. In this article, Dr Raimon Marin and Dr Solomos Georgiou of AFRY discuss the application of AFRY’s state-of-the-art modelling tool to optimise the size and production of a green hydrogen system and a green ammonia plant based on given renewable power profiles and their associated variability (e.g., hourly, daily, seasonally, and annually).