Tag: Urea

Market Insight courtesy of Argus Media

The two agricultural products most strongly associated with the economies of Southeast Asia are the food staple rice and export commodity palm oil. We explore the link between the region’s agricultural productivity and its fertilizer consumption.

Recent protests in Belarus have triggered a wave of share price volatility, London’s Financial Times reported on 18th August.

The last three years has seen a renaissance in fertilizer production and blending in sub-Saharan Africa. We highlight the expansion of capacity in Nigeria and other countries within the region.

Enhanced efficiency fertilizers (EEFs) occupy a small but high-value segment of the overall fertilizer market, although their production and use is accelerating. This trend is unsurprising given that their higher costs are usually more than offset by better efficiency and lower application rates.

The ammonia market continues to be oversupplied, and prices have dropped to historically low levels. Yuzhnyy rates dropped to $175/t f.o.b. in July. In spite of shutdowns in Trinidad and elsewhere, demand remains sluggish and recovery from the Covid epidemic is patchy, especially in the US.

Spanish fertilizer producer Fertiberia is teaming up with energy firm Iberdrola to build Europe’s largest plant for generating green hydrogen for industrial use – in this case ammonia production. The 100MW solar plant and accompanying 20 MWh lithium-ion battery system and 20MW electrolytic hydrogen production system will be built at a cost of $174 million, and electrolyse water to produce 720 t/a of hydrogen. When fed into Fertiberia’s existing ammonia plant at Puertollano, 250km south of Madrid, the hydrogen will allow a 10% reduction in natural gas use by the plant, saving the company 39,000 t/a in annual CO 2 emissions. Start-up is planned for 2021. Fertiberia will also use electrolysis-generated oxygen as a raw material for nitric acid, which is used to produce ammonium nitrate at the site.

Alistair Wallace, Head of Fertilizer Research, Argus Media, assesses price trends and the market outlook for nitrogen.

The following case study reports on a serious incident in a urea plant where a leak in the weld overlay in the urea reactor bottom resulted in a costly plant shutdown and near miss of rupture of the high pressure vessel. It is known that carbon steel can corrode with rates of 1000 mm/year not taking into account erosion due to flashing. The impact of the NH3/CO2 ratio on the corrosion rate is questionable.

Although the Covid-19 pandemic has been the big story in every market this year, the disruption and dislocations that this has caused have masked some of the bigger trends in the urea market, such as the revival of Chinese exports and India’s push for self-sufficiency.