Days 2 and 3 of the CRU’s 38th Nitrogen+Syngas 2025 Expoconference turned to the technical sessions, organised in three parallel streams covering: green ammonia technology, nitric acid and ammonium nitrate, plant operations and reliability, urea technology, digitalisation, carbon capture, emissions reduction and sustainable fertilizer production, and fertilizer finishing.
The production of urea, a critical component in the fertilizer industry, involves highly corrosive environments, particularly in the high-pressure sections of the process. This necessitates the use of advanced materials that can withstand such aggressive conditions to ensure long life and efficiency of urea production plants. Alleima, Stamicarbon, Saipem and TOYO report on their advanced material and equipment solutions for the urea industry.
In recent years, extensive and severe internal attack has been observed of carbon steel equipment and lines in aqua ammonia service at several Yara manufacturing sites across the globe. In all cases, the damage has a distinct flow-accelerated corrosion (FAC) signature which challenges the current understanding of FAC. All features typically observed for this kind of damage mechanism, that seem to be specific to the NH3 recovery section of ammonia plant, are reported. Upgrading the material of construction for this unit, will solve this failure mode, but a leak would potentially generate health and safety problem for the release of ammonia.
In Part 3 of this series on stripper efficiency issues, we continue the discussion on some some of the many causes of lower stripper efficiency. Here we discuss liquid divider fouling and bad installation of liquid dividers.
The reliability of primary reformers is a key issue for syngas plants. In this article O. Chung, N. Goodman and C. Thomas of Quest Integrity describe the damage mechanisms and material limitations that impact the reliability of reformer outlet systems and the improvements that may be implemented.
A plant operating a spent acid decomposition furnace as part of its sulphuric acid production facility desired to increase acid production primarily by processing additional spent acid while making minimal modifications to the plant equipment and operations. The Messer solution entailed introducing oxygen in two steps, both as an enrichment to the combustion air and by direct injection into the furnace. The resulting performance improvements exceeded the project objectives for acid production and spent acid decomposition, without increasing NOx emissions. This paper provides a summary of the system start-up and tuning and presents the resulting improvements and lessons learned.
MECS, Inc. (MECS) has developed a new impaction-based mist eliminator called Brink® Prime Impact™ , which offers equivalent or improved efficiency at higher throughput and the same pressure drop as traditional impaction beds, resulting in the ability to debottleneck existing inter-pass absorption towers and final absorption towers in sulphuric acid plants or design new or replacement towers with smaller diameters, thus reducing investment cost.
Gouda Refractories continues to upgrade its refractory solutions for the sulphur recovery industry as well as developing new superior products for installations operating at higher temperatures due to oxygen enrichment.
In this review article, Hatch’s Jayden Ladebruk, Lyndsay Tran, Amelia Parrenin, and Edward DeRose outline the wide range of phosphoric acid production technologies, and discuss how industry challenges are influencing the choice of phosphoric acid process.
Mathijs Sijpkes, Nuria Pascual Vasco and Jan Hermans of Sulphurnet discuss the importance of a whole life cycle cost analysis at the conceptual design phase when making investment decisions about new sulphur processing facilities.