Editorial comment
This month’s issue of World Fertilizer includes a keynote article from the International Fertilizer Association (IFA). In this article the IFA assesses the challenges involved in decarbonising global ammonia production and fertilizer usage. These challenges remain considerable as it is no secret that whilst the fertilizer industry is essential to global food production, and the world’s population continues to grow, its environmental footprint is substantial. The fertilizer industry is an emissions intensive industry, largely utilising natural gas and coal as feedstocks to produce hydrogen through reforming or gasification processes. It represents 1.3% of global CO2 emissions with ammonia production itself contributing to 90% of the fertilizer industry’s total energy consumption or approximately 2% of the world’s total energy consumption.
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With the fertilizer industry committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 this means significant investment in green hydrogen production and carbon capture technologies at scale. Governments across the globe need to back such development with incentives and support for the necessary renewable energy sources, energy storage facilities and overall infrastructure to enable the fertilizer industry to meet this key target.
An example of such cooperation between government and the fertilizer industry was recently announced by the US Department of Energy (DOE) as part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s ‘Investing in America’ agenda. That it comes so close to the US election is perhaps telling but nonetheless it represents a major investment in the fertilizer sector. In this milestone agreement, Wabash Valley Resources LLC will receive a guaranteed loan of US$1.559 billion from the DOE’s Loan Programs Office to help finance a commercial-scale waste-to-ammonia production facility utilising carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology in West Terre Haute, Indiana.
The total investment cost of this project is US$2.4 billion and the new facility will repurpose an industrial gasifier to utilise petroleum coke to produce 500 000 tpy of ammonia. Petcoke is a waste product of the oil refining process. The US is currently the largest exporter of petcoke in the world, often to low-income nations where it is combusted, generating large quantities of CO2 and other emissions. The new plant will produce low-carbon domestic ammonia as well as permanently geologically sequestering 1.6 million tpy of CO2, demonstrating a commercially and environmentally viable end-use alternative for petcoke. Not only will this be Indiana’s first fertilizer plant, but also the world’s first carbon negative ammonia production facility.
The Wabash Valley Resources project is precisely the type of project that the global fertilizer industry needs to be pursuing in order to reach net zero by 2050. It clearly demonstrates the collaboration required between policymakers, governments, industry players and research institutions as identified by the International Fertilizer Association in its article commencing on page 8 of this issue.
Also in this issue, PXiSE Energy Solutions (a Yokogawa company) consider how the fertilizer industry is moving towards the use of green hydrogen to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, starting on page 14. This issue also explores important topics including key process safety considerations, corrosion protection, transfer equipment, and much more.
