Tag: Construction

Building on its long experience and leading position within global ammonia production, logistics and trade, Yara says that it aims to capture opportunities in green shipping, agriculture and industrial applications; a market expected to grow by 60% over the next two decades. A major first step includes plans to fully electrify its ammonia plant at Porsgrunn, Norway, with the potential to cut 800,000 t/a of CO 2 , equivalent to the emissions from 300,000 passenger cars.

Norilsk Nickel has finally closed down its nickel smelting operation at Nikel in Russia’s Murmansk region; the company’s oldest still operating production facility. The shutdown is part of the company’s environmental programme, which aims to significantly reduce its environmental impact at all production sites. The Nikel closure will eliminate SO2 emissions in the cross-border area with Norway, which had become a major bone of contention with the Norwegian government. Norilsk aims to reduce SO2 emissions at Kola by 50% by the end of 2020 and 85% by the end of 2021, and is modernising its production in Monchegorsk, including the construction of new state-of-the-art facilities.

Construction work has begun on a new hydrocracking complex for the Assiut refinery in Egypt, in the central Nile valley, according to TechnipFMC plc, who won the $1 billion engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contract for the project. The contract involves construction of new processing units including a vacuum distillation unit, a diesel hydrocracking unit, a delayed coker unit, a distillate hydrotreating unit and a hydrogen production unit which will use TechnipFMC’s proprietary steam reforming technology.

Brimstone STS Ltd. today announced a new partnership with Sulphur Recovery Engineering Inc (SRE). The two companies say that this collaboration will bring together decades of experience and the latest technology in support of the sulphur recovery and gas treating industry worldwide.

A look back at some of the major events of 2020 for the sulphur and sulphuric acid industries, as well as a look forward as to how 2021 might look.

Although 2019 had been a volatile year for acid markets, with shutdowns disrupting supply, the coronavirus outbreak wrought even more havoc in 2020, across both supply and demand.

Several highly corrosion resistant materials are available today for use in handling process fluids encountered in the production of concentrated sulphuric acid. These alloys, properly selected for the operating conditions, provide the benefits of long operating life under harsh operating conditions extending the period of uninterrupted production cycles and lowering the incidence of catastrophic equipment failure. In this article, M. J. Cooke of Weir Minerals discusses materials of construction for pumps, valves and piping used in the production of sulphuric acid.

In early October Tesla held a ‘battery day’ event at its headquarters in Fremont, California. Speaking at the event, company founder and CEO Elon Musk outlined his vision for the electric car industry over the coming decades, and spoke particularly to his ambitions for the nickel industry. He had already called for more mining of nickel earlier in the year, and has said that Tesla is developing cathodes that will contain higher nickel and no cobalt. The latter comes after a lawsuit against Tesla and several other high-tech US firms for allegedly supporting human rights violations by buying cobalt from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Musk echoed the potential ‘reputational risk’ for the nickel market and called for more sustainable nickel production, dangling the prospect of a “giant contract” with any miners that could produce nickel in an “environmentally sensitive way.” Tesla is reportedly in discussions with Vale and BHP as well as the Indonesian government concerning potential investments in nickel production.

As urea plants grow in capacity, so does the need for finishing technologies with higher capacities. Barbara Cucchiella , senior process engineer at Stamicarbon, describes how her team has risen to the challenge of the global trend for larger granulation plants.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) have announced the ‘Next Gen Fertilizer Challenge’, a joint EPA-USDA partnership and competition to advance agricultural sustainability in the United States. The competition includes two challenges that seek proposals for new and existing fertilizer technologies to maintain or improve crop yields while reducing the impacts of fertilizers on the environment.