Tag: Production

State-of-the art technologies offered by thyssenkrupp, Casale and Stamicarbon are helping make nitrates production more secure and sustainable.

Fertilizer International presents a global round-up of phosphate rock, phosphoric acid and finished phosphates projects.

Ammonium nitrate (AN) is valued as a nitrogen fertilizer and mining explosive. Consequently, it is also widely traded and distributed globally. Some 20 percent of the 49 million tonnes manufactured annually is shipped around the world and stored in warehouses at various ports and inland destinations.

Yara and Lantmännen have signed an agreement to bring fossil-free mineral fertilizers to market.

Phosphate manufacturing is being enhanced thanks to process integration, digitalisation and other advances.

Gordon Feller looks at Gasunie’s plans to build a new nitrogen plant at Zuidbroek to allow for the progressive shutdown of the Groningen gas field, one of the largest in Europe.

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?

DuPont has agreed to sell its Clean Technologies business for $510 million to an international private equity consortium, comprising BroadPeak Global, Asia Green Fund and The Saudi Arabian Industrial Investments Company (Dussur). The new, independent company has been named Elessent Clean Technologies and will be a global leader in process technologies to drive sustainability and carbon neutrality in the metal, fertilizer, chemical and oil refining industries. Elessent retains exclusive rights to the technologies, expertise, products, and services including: MECS® sulphuric acid and environmental technologies, BELCO® scrubbing technologies, STRATCO® alkylation technology and IsoTherming® hydroprocessing technology. Derived from the words “element” and “essential,” Elessent says that it will help customers produce, optimise or separate essential elements every day, creating clean alternatives to traditional industrial processes to minimise the impact on the environment while enabling our customers to produce essential elements critical to everyday life.

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.

Sulphur processing from sour gas fields dominates regional production, but the geographical remoteness of the area from end use markets and restrictions on sulphur storage means that producers often opt to reinject acid gas into oil and gas wells.