CRU Phosphates welcomes you to Warsaw!

CONFERENCE PREVIEW

CRU Phosphates welcomes you to Warsaw!

CRU Events will convene the 2024 Phosphates International Conference & Exhibition in Warsaw at the Hilton Warsaw City Hotel, 26-28 February.

The 16th CRU Phosphates Conference returns this year as a live, in-person event in Warsaw, Poland. Located in central Europe, where east meets west, Warsaw makes the ideal location for the global phosphates industry to meet up, network and access crucial market intelligence and technical updates.

This timely conference will inform and spur discussions on key issues such as sustainability, trade, supply chain challenges and technical advances – all of which are occurring against a tumultuous market backdrop of volatile fertilizer prices and supply constraints.

What to expect – the 2024 agenda

Uniquely, CRU Phosphates combines a commercial agenda with a technical agenda in one single event. This enables the conference to cover the entire value chain of the phosphate industry – including the fertilizer, feed and industrial segments – from both an operational and market perspective.

CRU’s principal phosphate analyst, Humphrey Knight, will provide a top-level global outlook in the opening plenary presentation. He will be asking, “Is a recovery in global phosphate fertilizer demand still on the cards for 2024?”

A panel of industry leaders from The Mosaic Company, ICL Growing Solutions and Norge Mining will then debate the role of the phosphate industry in delivering food security and the energy transition. Throughout the event, additional industry perspectives will be offered by executives from other major producers, including Deepak Fertilisers, Ma’den and Nutrien.

Reflecting the global nature of the industry and its audience, the conference agenda will provide insights and outlooks from key supply and demand markets, including India, North America and Saudi Arabia. Major production investments and emerging junior mining projects will also be featured.

New themes for 2024 include:

• How can the phosphate industry deliver global food security: Is enough collective action being taken to produce and ensure sufficient food for all whilst reducing costly environmental damage?

• Towards sustainable fertilizers: What actions can the value chain take to produce and deliver sustainable phosphate?

• The future of farming – emerging trends: Will the adoption of technology and agronomic advances in precision farming, biostimulants, and regenerative agriculture reduce demand for synthetic fertilizer?

Sustainability continues to be a driving force throughout the industry, as phosphate producers balance the dual requirements of food security with their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) targets. The conference agenda will also focus on the latest technological advances and operational strategies – spanning the whole of the value chain from mine to market.

The conference’s commercial and market track will cover:

• Key phosphate growth markets

• Agronomy and the future of farming

• Regional phosphate production

• Shifting towards sustainable fertilizers

• Supply chain and trade dynamics

• Project updates and project financing

• Regulatory developments

• The LFP battery market

• Environmental challenges and solutions

• Specialty fertilizer market update.

While the technical innovation track will cover:

• Phosphate rock – quality and grinding

• Advances in the phosphoric acid process, technology and equipment

• Enhanced phosphate beneficiation

• Generating value from phosphogypsum

• Fertilizer production innovations.

The tailor-made technical innovation track is designed to cater to the needs of production personnel throughout the phosphates value chain. Indeed, CRU Phosphates 2024 is set to break records with an impressive lineup of 23 technical innovation presentations and 12 dynamic technical showcases.

These will offer a deep dive into the intricacies of new technology, revolutionary processes, groundbreaking materials, and state-of-the-art equipment developments. Delegates will discover how these innovations can elevate efficiency, ensure environmental compliance, and increase productivity and plant capacities.

Register online now!

The full agenda for CRU Phosphates 2024 is online now. Register today for your place in Warsaw. For more information visit: www.phosphatesconference.com

A selection of CRU Phosphates 2024 abstracts from the conference’s technical innovation track.

Use of low-grade phosphate for superphosphate production

Bradley Pulverizer

This presentation from Bradley Pulverizer looks at how the decline in the quality of available phosphate rock sources is affecting the ability to produce high grade superphosphate fertilizers, even after beneficiation after mining (Fertilizer International 517, p53). Rock quality is also becoming a key consideration due to concerns about cadmium build up in soils. High silica levels in some rocks, meanwhile, also cause material handling and size reduction issues, as well as wear in the mills and acidulation mixer. The presentation will also look at the enhancement of final products via the production of high grade or specialist fertilizers such as high magnesium and high sulphur superphosphate.

Phosphoric acid plants – engineering by experience

De Smet Agro

De Smet Agro explains how to reduce operational problems at phosphoric acid plants, while maintaining a high on-stream factor, drawing on the company’s accumulated engineering practice gained over more than 60 years. The key to this is the ability to properly complete the process package for phosphoric acid projects and design the related off-site elements and utilities.

The design basis for a new phosphoric acid plant is usually put together by the plant owner, licensor and licensee at the start of the project – and forms the foundation for successful engineering studies. It also allows all the parties involved to gain a better understanding of actual markets and therefore keep in-house engineering know-how up-to-date. The process design package (PDP) for the plant is usually prepared by the process owner or the licensor, who will provide process guaranties subject to certain conditions.

Fluorine management in phosphoric acid plants

JESA Technologies

The phosphate industry is being asked to put in place more and more environmental controls as time moves forward. Phosphate rock sourced from deposits worldwide contains fluorine that is largely liberated during the acidulation process at phosphoric acid plants. While most plant operators can meet their fluorine emission standards, this incurs extra costs due to the generation of fluorine-rich effluents. The fluorosilicic acid (FSA) obtained requires either further processing or neutralisation at additional cost. JESA Technologies (JT) has, however, patented a new process to handle these fluorine-rich liquid streams, regardless of FSA quality. This will shift the economics of fluorine management away from being a necessary cost to a potential source of revenue. JT believes this new technology will provide producers with an environmentally-friendly and economically attractive way of addressing the ubiquitous fluorine problem that is inherent to virtually every phosphoric acid plant globally.

A novel and sustainable Mg leaching process for phosphate rock

Prayon Technologies

Prayon has developed a novel magnesium removal process which can be added as a chemical beneficiation stage after the existing mechanical beneficiation stage and upstream of the phosphoric acid plant. For the first time, this process enables high quality phosphate fertilizers (NPK, MAP, DAP, NPS) to be produced using phosphate rock with a high magnesium content (up to 3.5% MgO) and high minor element (MER) ratio of up to 0.22. This highly sustainable process generates no effluent, according to Prayon, and will allow fertilizer and phosphoric acid producers to widen their sources of phosphate rock supply.

A novel calcite flotation collector for phosphate beneficiation

Nalco Water – Ecolab

Upgrading phosphate rock by flotation can be difficult due to the presence of gangue components (carbonaceous, silicious and clay minerals) in sedimentary phosphate deposits. Beneficiation of these types of phosphate rock typically requires multistage calcite and silica flotation. In response to this challenge, Nalco Water has developed a unique collector formulation (NALFLOTE® ) that offers improved selectivity for carbonaceous gangue. It has been shown to deliver the desired phosphate concentrate grade and recovery during reverse flotation with a high slime-bearing flotation feed. The NALFLOTE® range is robust and delivers improved metallurgical performance for a variety of sedimentary ores from multiple regions across the globe – being able to withstand variations in gangue mineralogy and process water quality.

Use of phosphogypsum as an NPK filler

PT Petrokimia Gresik

The presentation showcases the use of phosphogypsum as an NPK fertilizer filler material. This application is the first of its kind in Indonesia. Phosphogypsum management costs Indonesian phosphate fertilizer producer PT Petrokimia Gresik $160/t. In response to this, an in-house team developed a process that largely utilises the gypsum waste generated by the company’s production operations. This has received a utilisation permit from the Indonesian government and has been granted a patent by the country’s law ministry.

Gypsum regeneration with clean energy

Pegasus TSI, Inc.

The presentation reviews the technical and economic feasibility of using clean energy from sulphuric acid production to calcine clean gypsum and produce SO2 and CaO. The SO2 generated can be fed into the existing sulphuric acid plant to produce sulphuric acid. The CaO by-product, meanwhile, can be commercialised as a high-quality lime raw material with a low carbon footprint. The overall approach offers a unique way of managing fertilizer industry resources.

Debottlenecking IFFCO’s Kandla fertilizer plant with a granulator pipe reactor

Casale SA

Casale’s granulator pipe reactor (GPR) is recognised as one of the most globally advanced technologies for solid fertilizer production. Results are presented for a revamping project at IFFCO’s Kandla plant in India. The project involved the design, installation, start-up and optimisation of Casale GPRs at Kandla’s E&F trains. Both trains were originally designed in 1999 using Grande Paroisse (now Casale) DAP and NPK production technology. The objective was to increase production rates while minimising investment costs and maintaining high product quality. The revamp achieved a 15-25 percent increase in output at each train and, overall, the production of DAP/NPK grades increased by an average of 600-800 t/d.