Nitrogen+Syngas 385 Sept-Oct 2023
30 September 2023
End of an era
“Billingham was the birthplace of the UK ammonia industry…”
The closure of CF Industries’ ammonia plant at Billingham, Teesside (see Industry News, page 8) marks the end of a long era for UK fertilizer manufacture. The facility was the last operating ammonia plant in the country, following CF’s decision to permanently close its site at Ince in Cheshire in June last year. Going forward, Billingham will now rely on imported ammonia as a feedstock to run the nitric acid and 625,000 t/a ammonium nitrate plants on the site.
The decision is an economic one, of course. CF has long cited high UK natural gas prices as a barrier to competitiveness. Both sites were idled in September 2021 when gas prices soared, and only a government subsidy to secure CO2 supplies for the food and drinks industry persuaded CF to reopen the Billingham ammonia plant. Billingham was the larger and more efficient plant, but a 2021 strategic review by CF found that ammonium nitrate sales to UK customers had fallen by almost 30% since the 2017-18 season due to intense competition from lower-cost imports, forcing CF to sell surplus AN on the international market at “unsustainably” low margins.
It is a sad end to a long history of ammonia production at the site. Billingham was the birthplace of the UK ammonia industry. It was established in the wake of the First World War to make synthetic ammonia for explosives, using the (at the time) novel Haber-Bosch process. The government sold the site in 1919 to Brunner-Mond, who developed the ammonia plant based on a copy of the BASF process at Oppau, using coke oven gas as a feedstock. Operations began at what was then a 24 t/d plant in December 1924, and three more units were completed by 1929 to take output at the site to just under 400 t/d of ammonia. In the meantime, Brunner-Mond was part of a major merger in 1926 with Nobel Explosives, the United Alkali Company and the British Dyestuffs Corporation, all of whom had a degree of shared ownership, to form Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI).
ICI improved the process by switching to a gasified oil and then later a steam reformed naphtha feed, but oil gasification necessitated the construction of an air separation unit which proved troublesome, and led to the first symposium on ammonia safety (a report on the most recent one can be found on pages 26-28) in 1955. In 1963 ICI developed a 360 t/d single stream naphtha fed ammonia plant at Severnside, but to move to larger plant scales it licensed MW Kellogg technology to build two 900 t/d plants at Billingham. The old steam reformers from the former ammonia plants were used for the Low Pressure Methanol process at Billingham in 1966, a 600 t/d plant. ICI also made developments in catalysts and ammonia process engineering at Billingham, eventually developing their own ammonia process, the Leading Concept for Ammonia, as well as later, in conjunction with Uhde, the dual pressure process.
In the late 1960s, ammonium nitrate capacity was added at the site, with a second AN plant being built in the 1970s. By now natural gas from the North Sea was being landed in the UK, and the Billingham plants were converted from naphtha to gas feed, and a fourth, larger (1,500 t/d) ammonia plant built – it is this plant that is now being retired. The last major investment at Billingham was a large nitric acid plant with a capacity of 1,000 t/d that started operation in 1985.
However, into the 1990s, the site was beginning to feel the cold winds of international competition, while gas supply from the North Sea was starting to decline. The three low pressure ammonia plants were shut down, as well as the oldest ammonium nitrate plant, and methanol production. ICI itself was broken up, to become, amongst other units, ICI Explosives (now Orica), ICI Katalco (now part of Johnson Matthey) and ICI Fertilizers, which was bought by Terra Nitrogen from the US in 1997. In the 2000s, Terra combined with Yara to produce the GrowHow UK business, which was in turn sold to CF Industries in 2010.
The closure of the final ammonia plant at Billingham is a symptom of the pressures that the wider European nitrogen industry faces, in the wake of the end of gas supplies from Russia and a shift towards more expensive LNG imports. How much of the industry will weather these current storms remains very much an open question.
