Tag: Demand

Lithium ion battery production is driving major expansions in nickel and cobalt extraction, but lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery use is growing rapidly.

All is not well with the Chinese economy. Growth has slowed to a fraction of what it was, only 0.8% in 2Q 2023, and has not bounced back as expected as covid lockdowns were eased. Exports and imports are both falling, debt has reached 300% of GDP, youth unemployment is running at 20%, and the property market is collapsing, with huge property developers like Evergrande and Country Garden only avoiding bankruptcy via government arranged loan restructurings. Consumer prices have fallen year on year, raising the spectre of deflation, and productivity growth has fallen from 4.5% year on year in 2006-7 to around 0.8% today. The yuan is trading at a 16-year low against the dollar.

Gustavo Horbach is EuroChem Group’s new Head of South America with responsibility for operations and strategic business development in the region. Gustavo was previously EuroChem’s VP for upstream production and investment projects in South America. He has been with the company since 2021.

Antoine Hoxha, the new Director General of Fertilizers Europe, looks ahead at the future of the EU fertilizer industry, setting out his vision of an industry transformed by decarbonisation, new energy markets, sustainable agriculture and the circular economy.

Many crops are sensitive to chloride due to a genetic susceptibility. Similarly, crops can become stressed when soil salinity reaches high levels, a situation that typically occurs in water scarce regions. So, when is low-chloride crop nutrition needed? Dr Heike Thiel of K+S Minerals and Agriculture GmbH provides some answers.

Applications of chloride-containing fertilizers need to be carefully managed for crops such as berries, broad beans, citrus fruits, nuts, potatoes and stone fruits. Selecting chloride-free nutrient sources instead can offer distinct advantages.

The International Methanol Technology Operators Forum (IMTOF) met at the Leonardo Royal St Paul’s hotel in London from June 11th-14th.

While demand for ammonia remains – for now at least – strongly tied to fertilizer and farming, over the three decades that I’ve edited this publication, methanol’s story has been a very different one, with a succession of major new slices of demand coming every few years from new applications that flare up and then mature or even drop away again. For a while in the 1990s it was MTBE, the oxygenated fuel additive that had a brief flourish in the US before being shut down by leaking fuel tanks leaching into ground water. Then there was dimethyl ether (DME) as a blendstock for LPG, and methanol itself directly blended into gasoline in China to keep up with soaring vehicle fuel demand. More recently, methanol to olefins (MTO) has added almost another 25% of demand over and above existing chemical and fuel uses. But as the world cracks down on coal production and use, China’s attempt to use methanol as a way of using domestic coal to replace imported oil seems to have passed its high water mark and begun to recede.

The world’s transition toward the use of hydrogen and ammonia as clean energy and fuel sources will depend upon production technologies that are affordable, scalable, and meet net zero carbon targets. 8 Rivers recently introduced8 RH2 , a groundbreaking solution that offers world-leading efficiency in hydrogen production and captures over 99% of CO2 emissions. Maulik Shelat of 8 Rivers provides an overview of the technology with a comparison to other low-carbon hydrogen production technologies.

Linde has developed a new adsorptive carbon dioxide removal process, called HISORP® CC, including but not limited to blue ammonia production. Based on a combination of mature technologies the process overcomes the drawbacks of traditional CO2 removal techniques and provides a carbon capture rate of greater than 99%. Thomas Ried discusses the pros and cons of different process configurations for CO2 removal and the benefits of the new technology.