Ammonia markets continue to be dominated by unplanned outages in Saudi Arabia (where the SAFCO 4 and one of the Ma’aden ammonia plants are both down, removing 2.3 million t/a of merchant ammonia from the market). This comes on top of other shutdowns earlier in the year on Trinidad, in the US and Australia.
Maire Tecnimont SpA says that its subsidiaries MET Development, Stamicarbon and NextChem have collectively begun work on a renewable power-to-fertilizer plant in Kenya. MET Development has signed an agreement with Oserian Development Company for the development of the plant at the Oserian Two lakes Industrial Park, on the southern banks of Lake Naivasha, 100 km north of Nairobi.
At a time when green (or maybe blue) ammonia is being looked to as a way of reducing carbon emissions, substituting for hydrocarbons in a variety of potential uses, a conference held at the start of June was a reminder that nitrogen, its neighbour on the Periodic Table, is by no means off the hook on the environmental front. The Eighth Global Nitrogen Conference – held over from last year because of Covid-19, and this year held virtually, as most events are for the time being – was the latest in a series of tri-annual meetings convened by the International Nitrogen Initiative (INI), with support from the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and the German Ministry of the Environment. The INI grew out of the 1979 UNECE Convention on Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution and 1999 Gothenburg Protocol, and is concerned specifically with ‘reactive nitrogen’ (i.e. nitrogen not tightly bound to itself in a triple bond, which makes up 78% of the air around us).
What lessons can be learnt from the successful commissioning and start-up of major fertilizer industry construction projects? Recent case studies from the nitrogen, phosphate and potash industries provide some interesting answers.
Market Insight courtesy of Argus Media
The Chemical & Process Technologies business unit of thyssenkrupp Industrial Solutions is celebrating a milestone in 2021. It is one hundred years since engineer and entrepreneur Friedrich Uhde founded his own plant engineering company in a barn at his parents-in-law’s farm in Dortmund-Bövinghausen on April 6th, 1921. Now, in this centenary year, the origins of the firm are to become visible in its name again: thyssenkrupp is changing the business unit’s name to thyssenkrupp Uhde.
February saw ammonia prices jump due to a series of plant outages, including EBIC in Egypt, and several plants in North America, including two on Trinidad; the 760,000 t/a Nutrien 4 plant and 500,000 t/a Tringen 2 plant, both due to gas shortages, as well as Yara and BASF’s 750,000 t/a unit at Freeport, Texas.
The ammonia industry has always dealt with fluctuations in supply and demand as well as volatile feedstock and energy costs. The unexpected global pandemic that started in 2020 has injected a higher degree of uncertainty for ammonia manufacturers’ operating costs and product demand for fertilizer. W. Poe of AVEVA discusses how advanced process control systems can help ammonia producers turn economic uncertainty into a competitive advantage.
Nitrogen+Syngas’s annual listing of new ammonia, urea, nitric acid and ammonium nitrate plants.
Market Insight courtesy of Argus Media