Tag: Demand

Debora Simoes, Bruno Fardim , and Cleber Vieira of Agroconsult report on what’s driving the Brazilian fertilizer market currently and look at prospects for the coming year.

Improvements to equipment and materials are driving greater operational performance and higher efficiencies at urea plants. Recent advances are reviewed.

Correct fertilizer usage at each crop stage can helps avocado growers improve their yield, quality and profitability. ICL’s Mateo Martinez and Alveiro Salamanca-Jimenez explain how growers can supply crop nutrients to avocado trees, efficiently and effectively, using economically- and environmentally-sustainable principles.

German slurry handling specialist Vogelsang has just launched a new acidification technology which it claims will reduce ammonia emissions from agriculture, reducing up to 70% of ammonia to nutrient rich ammonium. Its new SyreN technology is an onboard sulphuric acid dosing system for tractors that treats slurry or digestate as it is applied to the land. It uses a front-linkage mounted unit to carry the acid, which also improves tractor weight distribution. The acid is dosed when the organic fertiliser is fed to the applicator, with a pH regulator automatically controlling and adjusting the flow. Nitrogen uptake of organic fertilizer is also increased by up to 1/3 as the ammonium is more easily metabolised by the soil. Results from a study in Germany showed that the acidifying slurry increased crop yield by up to 20%. The sulphur contained in the acid also becomes available to the plants as sulphate after spreading, eliminating the need for an additional pass over the field to administer a supplementary sulphur fertiliser, such as ammonium sulphate nitrate. At approximately 30 kg/ha, the amount of sulphur introduced into the crop with the SyreN system corresponds to the average amount of sulphur that is already applied to crops in the course of a growing season.

The extensive sweep of financial sanctions against Russia in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, coupled with Russia’s position as the leading exporter of numerous commodities means that the impact of the 2022 price shock may be worse than 2008.

It was supposedly Lenin who said that there were “weeks when decades happen”, and the past few weeks have felt very much like that. The outbreak of conflict in Ukraine has sent shockwaves across the world and may have changed it permanently.

We look ahead at fertilizer industry prospects for the next 12 months, including the key economic and agricultural drivers likely to shape the market during 2022.

Belarus sanctions, freight costs and strong demand are pushing MOP pricing to new heights, says Andy Hemphill, senior editor for potash and sulphuric acid at ICIS Fertilizers.

Recent spikes in natural gas prices, particularly in Europe, have highlighted the tightness of natural gas markets around the world going into the northern hemisphere winter. Are ammonia and methanol producers on for a run of high gas prices in 2022?

It’s a slightly dispiriting fact about the sulphur industry that most of its producers don’t really want it. If you’re a refiner or a sour gas producer, you mainly care about the diesel and gasoline or natural gas that you can process and sell, and the sulphur is just the inconvenient component that the law and your customers force you to remove. But at times when sulphur prices, as they have at the start of this January, reach levels as high as $300/t, then the industry standing joke is that sulphur suddenly stops being a by-product or waste product, and starts to become a ‘co-product’ instead.