April 25, 2012
Notore joint ventures with Mitsubishi to develop fertiliser plant in Nigeria
In order to develop an ammonia, urea and other petrochemicals plant at its existing facility at Onne, Rivers State, Nigeria, Notore Chemical Industries Limited (Notore) has just signed a Joint Venture Agreement with Mitsubishi Corporation at Mitsubishi''s corporate headquarters in Tokyo, Japan.
Mitsubishi Corporation is a global integrated business enterprise that develops and operates businesses across virtually every industry including industrial finance, energy, metals, machinery, chemicals, foods and environmental business.
The project will involve the construction of an integrated plant complex with production capacities of 1,700 tonnes per day of ammonia, 3,000 tonnes/day of urea and 1,500 tonnes/day of other petrochemicals.
An agreement was also signed with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) in Japan to carry out the pre-FEED for the project. It is expected that early works, (including FEED) should be concluded in the first quarter of 2013. The early works phase will be followed by 36 months of Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC). The new plant, owing to its advantage of being built on a "brown-field" site with existing gas facilities and other infrastructure, is expected to come on-stream by 2016.
Notore commenced production of commercial quantities of ammonia in January 2010 and granular urea in April 2010 at its 300,000 tonnes per annum ammonia and 500,000 tonnes/annum urea capacity plant. Today, the company has achieved its plant''s nameplate capacity through a refurbishment and operational excellence programme that it embarked upon. A debottlenecking exercise is planned for Q4, 2013 which will further increase annual output to 430,000 tonnes of ammonia and 750,000 tonnes of urea.
Proven world class technologies will be deployed for the ammonia, other petrochemicals, urea synthesis and urea granulation processes. The project has tremendous environmental benefits. Natural gas, which is currently being flared in Nigeria, will be utilised as the raw material for the production of these chemicals. The combined urea and petrochemicals plant project will have the additional advantage of being more environmentally friendly as excess carbon dioxide from the process would be further utilised for the petrochemicals production. The plant will create about 1,000 direct jobs and provide 10,500 indirect jobs nationwide. Over two million farmers would have access to the fertilisers which could mean a 10-fold increase of their harvest with a rippling contribution to Nigeria''s GDP to over NGN300 billion (US$1.9 billion).