Fertilizers: where food and energy markets meet
Alzbeta Klein, CEO and Director General of the International Fertilizer Association (IFA), sets the scene for IFA’s Annual Conference in Prague, 22-24 May.
Alzbeta Klein, CEO and Director General of the International Fertilizer Association (IFA), sets the scene for IFA’s Annual Conference in Prague, 22-24 May.
Market Insight courtesy of Argus Media. Urea: Scarcity continued to drive urea prices higher in some markets at the end of April. The US market remains short on urea and prices spiked to reflect this. Nola barges for April were trading as high as $450/st f.o.b. ($490/t cfr), 55 percent up on this year’s low point. Southeast Asia remains short on urea too, amid planned and unplanned turnarounds, with one cargo trading at around $345/t f.o.b.
Market Insight courtesy of Argus Media. Urea: Prices fell in most global markets in early March as suppliers chased limited demand. Although India’s purchase tender has yet to formally conclude, IPL looks set to book 1.15 million tonnes of urea at $330-334.8/t cfr, with traders mainly sourcing from Russian and Middle Eastern producers.
Blended and compound NPK fertilizers are a mainstay of many markets globally. We review the main production technology options.
Sulphur Experts Inc. combines new learnings, historical data, and recent onsite experience from operating companies to show what factors really impact ammonia plugging risk and what can be done to control them in order to allow for a wider operating range for SWS processing in the refinery SRU.
Rising costs of fossil fuels in many markets, including coal in China and high gas costs in Europe are pushing up ammonia production costs. Can the falling cost of electrolysis make green ammonia production cost competitive in the near future?
Previously, recuperative reforming has been mostly applied for capacity increase revamps, but nowadays it is a key enabler for efficient low carbon hydrogen and syngas production. Jan-Jaap Riegman of Technip Energies, Francesco Baratto of Casale and Stefan Gebert of Clariant discuss the benefits of recuperative reforming for reducing the carbon footprint of existing assets.
Highly efficient N2 O abatement technologies, coupled with the continually rising CO2 e price/ tonne are the driving forces behind nitric acid plant operators looking for increasingly sensitive and precise measurements of the N2 O mass emission. David Inward of Sick AG discusses new state-of-the-art emission monitoring technology which provides the measurements required.
CRU’s Nitrogen + Syngas conference convened at the Hyatt Regency Barcelona Tower in Barcelona, from March 5th-8th.
BASF says that its high-pressure regenerative CO2 capture technology HiPACT ® , codeveloped by BASF and engineering partner JGC Corporation will be used by INPEX, one of Japan’s largest exploration and production companies, in its Kashiwazaki Clean Hydrogen/Ammonia Project. This is Japan’s first demonstration project for the production of blue hydrogen/ammonia from domestically produced natural gas, the consistent implementation of carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) in domestic depleted gas fields and the use of hydrogen for power generation and ammonia production. The project is funded by the Japanese governmental organization New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO).