Tag: Demand

We look at the future of polyhalite mining and its use as a fertilizer following Anglo American’s announcement that investment in its UK-Based Woodsmith mine will fall to zero in 2026 under current plans.

The dry bulk market is forecast to cool, after a year of high freight rates driven by demand shocks. Should ships return to the Red Sea during 2025, then the market will weaken even more. This development, explains BIMCO shipping analyst Filipe Gouveia, would particularly affect the supramax and handysize vessels typically used in fertilizer shipping.

The prospect of a drastic expansion in potassium sulphate production has been linked to a plethora of projects in Australia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. These have sought to take advantage of market tightness and high price premiums. Yet investor interest in supposedly promising projects has waned over the last few years. In this insight article, CRU’s Alexander Chreky explains the reasons behind the high project failure rate, as well as highlighting some limited successes.

The International Fertilizer Association (IFA) recently published its annual medium-term outlook for the fertilizer market. This followed presentations by Laura Cross and Armelle Gruère of IFA’s Market Intelligence Service at the Association’s Annual Conference in Singapore in late May.

Ronald Clemens , ICL’s Marketing & Portfolio Manager CRF, talks to Fertilizer International about the role of controlled-release fertilizers in sustainable agriculture.

The US fertilizer industry, ranked fourth globally in terms of total production capacity, has grown and developed alongside an increasingly sophisticated domestic agricultural sector. The Biden administration has earmarked $900 million for investment in fertilizer assets to boost domestic production capacity and reduce input costs to farmers.

In our May/June issue I discussed the race to be the next major green shipping fuel, in which methanol and ammonia both remain significant contenders, but which methanol appeared to be pulling ahead in. But more recently, a few stories from the past few weeks have left me not quite as sure as I was about that. Firstly, there’s the news in our Syngas News section this issue that the FlagshipONE green methanol project in Sweden is being delayed and possibly abandoned, because demand for green methanol for shipping has not actually materialised as fast as was anticipated.

With green ammonia from renewable energy facing cost hurdles to adoption, thoughts have turned to using nuclear energy as a carbon free alternative.

The nitric acid industry has made great strides in reducing nitrous oxide emissions over the past few decades, but emissions from agriculture due to nitrogen fertilizers remain a problematic source of N2 O in the atmosphere.

Demand for nitrates has rebounded after a difficult period following the dislocations caused by the war in Ukraine, with UAN in particular seeing rapid growth. Technical ammonium nitrate is also growing on the back of increased mining activity.