Tag: Demand

India’s new batch of urea plants are coming on-stream or nearing completion, but can the country regain the self-sufficiency in urea production that it enjoyed in the 1990s?

Florian Gruschwitz of MAN Energy Solutions takes a look at the current investment decisions influencing green hydrogen projects on the path to decarbonisation, reviews technologies that are available today, and discusses what it will take to ramp up a global green hydrogen economy.

For some years the fastest growing sector of the methanol market was Chinese olefins production. However, with growth there flattening out, it is traditional chemical uses which are taking over again as drivers of demand growth, with, longer term, a major prospect from fuel and energy applications.

High feedstock prices and regulatory burdens continue to put pressure on European nitrogen producers to innovate.

Debora Simoes, Bruno Fardim , and Cleber Vieira of Agroconsult report on what’s driving the Brazilian fertilizer market currently and look at prospects for the coming year.

Improvements to equipment and materials are driving greater operational performance and higher efficiencies at urea plants. Recent advances are reviewed.

Correct fertilizer usage at each crop stage can helps avocado growers improve their yield, quality and profitability. ICL’s Mateo Martinez and Alveiro Salamanca-Jimenez explain how growers can supply crop nutrients to avocado trees, efficiently and effectively, using economically- and environmentally-sustainable principles.

German slurry handling specialist Vogelsang has just launched a new acidification technology which it claims will reduce ammonia emissions from agriculture, reducing up to 70% of ammonia to nutrient rich ammonium. Its new SyreN technology is an onboard sulphuric acid dosing system for tractors that treats slurry or digestate as it is applied to the land. It uses a front-linkage mounted unit to carry the acid, which also improves tractor weight distribution. The acid is dosed when the organic fertiliser is fed to the applicator, with a pH regulator automatically controlling and adjusting the flow. Nitrogen uptake of organic fertilizer is also increased by up to 1/3 as the ammonium is more easily metabolised by the soil. Results from a study in Germany showed that the acidifying slurry increased crop yield by up to 20%. The sulphur contained in the acid also becomes available to the plants as sulphate after spreading, eliminating the need for an additional pass over the field to administer a supplementary sulphur fertiliser, such as ammonium sulphate nitrate. At approximately 30 kg/ha, the amount of sulphur introduced into the crop with the SyreN system corresponds to the average amount of sulphur that is already applied to crops in the course of a growing season.

The extensive sweep of financial sanctions against Russia in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine, coupled with Russia’s position as the leading exporter of numerous commodities means that the impact of the 2022 price shock may be worse than 2008.

It was supposedly Lenin who said that there were “weeks when decades happen”, and the past few weeks have felt very much like that. The outbreak of conflict in Ukraine has sent shockwaves across the world and may have changed it permanently.