Tag: Ammonia

The Belarusian Potash Company (BPC) has agreed new annual potash supply contracts with India and China.

ICIS, the independent commodity intelligence company, provides an overview of the nitrogen market. The world supply of urea looks set to outpace market demand in 2021, as several new projects come on-stream. Global ammonia demand, in contrast, is expected to rebound strongly this year after a difficult 2020. The flurry of recent green ammonia projects announcements is another significant market development.

Fertilizer markets are rallying to an extent not seen in almost a decade. This is primarily being driven by strong demand fundamentals, with crop prices moving to their highest point since 2013. But low pipeline inventories and supply disruptions have also played a part. In this guest editorial, CRU’s Chris Lawson explains what’s driving this rally and highlights the key supporting factors.

Globally, thyssenkrupp Industrial solution (tkIS) has engineered and built nine urea granulation plants during the last 10 years. Based on this experience, Benedict Jass, Marc Wieschalla and Ivo Mueller of tkIS describe two different cooling concepts for urea granules – fluid bed cooling and bulk flow cooling – and their contrasting advantages and disadvantages.

Market Insight courtesy of Argus Media

We highlight recent advances in ammonia and dust scrubbing systems for urea plants from Stamicarbon, thyssenkrupp Industrial Solutions and Toyo Engineering Corporation.

The ammonia industry faced a difficult February, due to extremely cold weather conditions in the northern hemisphere. In the US, production outages resulting from winter storm Uri affected up to 7 million t/a of capacity.

Market Insight courtesy of Argus Media

Shutdowns in technical ammonia capacity due to the pandemic have contributed to make 2020 a turbulent year for ammonia markets, but plant shutdowns, strong fertilizer demand and a shortage of new merchant ammonia capacity are contributing to finally removing the burden of overcapacity.

Several safety risks threaten urea high pressure equipment such as high pressures, high temperatures, various kind of corrosion phenomena, crystallisation risks, and the release of large volumes of toxic ammonia in case of a leak. A significant number of serious incidents with high pressure urea equipment still occur in the industry and, in 50% of cases, a failing leak detection system was one of the main causes. UreaKnowHow’s Risk Register for a 316L urea grade reactor identifies 50+ safety risks of which 75% can be prevented by operating a proper leak detection system. In this article, UreaKnowHow answers some key questions about the importance of an effective active leak detection system.