CRU recently relaunched its Fertilizer International and BCInsight Platform. This relaunch coincided with the Fertilizer Latino Americano (FLA) conference in Rio de Janeiro, where we issued our inaugural sentiment survey for delegates. This insight presents and analyses the survey results, which point towards an optimistic tone for 2025 markets in Brazil and beyond. Prices are […]
Nickel sulphate is an intermediate step in the production of materials for batteries, and is seeing rapid demand growth as the auto industry moves towards electric power trains.
Although China remains the world’s largest phosphate producer, it has been overtaken as the largest exporter by Morocco in recent years as domestic producers face continuing restrictions on exports.
The Caspian Sea region is home to extensive sour gas reserves which produce large volumes of sulphur. Exports are difficult, but the Kazakh uranium industry is consuming an increasing amount.
We look ahead at fertilizer industry prospects for the next 12 months, including the key economic and agricultural drivers likely to shape the market during 2025.
Continuing growth in Chinese ammonium sulphate production is leading to a continuing flood of exports, as greater awareness of the utility of sulphur as a fertilizer leads to increasing global demand.
While underlying supply and demand criteria continue to set floors and ceilings for nitrogen and other syngas derived products, political events as ever have the potential to derail all calculations. While much attention has focused on the US election, the escalating crisis in the Middle East continues to have the potential to threaten fertilizer trade in multiple ways. As this issue was going to press, Israel had just launched its retaliatory missile strike on Tehran, on October 26th, the latest in a series of tit for tat attacks between Israel and Iran, in particular an Iranian missile strike on Israel on October 1st. The Iranian government appeared to be downplaying the results as “limited”, but said that it considered itself “entitled and obligated to defend itself”.
Short term supply constraints are dominating acid markets at present, but increasing smelter production across Asia may lead to oversupply in the longer term.
An ammonium nitrate industry geared around producing explosives for the mining sector is now being joined by a major urea project and a number of renewables-based products for export of green ammonia.
One challenge of a green revamp by stepwise injection of green hydrogen into existing ammonia/urea complexes is to cover the nitrogen demand for the ammonia synthesis while stepwise reducing the front-end load, usually by applying a cost-intensive air separation unit (ASU). thyssenkrupp Uhde GmbH has developed an advantageous concept whereby, instead of an ASU, the nitrogen gap is closed by the introduction of pretreated reformer flue gas back into the ammonia process, with the side effect to also enhance CO2 production.