Notore to increase fertilizer production through JV with Mitsubishi

Notore Chemical Industries Limited (Notore), owner of the only urea fertiliser plant in sub-Saharan Africa, has just signed a Joint Venture Agreement with Mitsubishi Corporation at Mitsubishi's corporate headquarters in Tokyo, Japan to develop an ammonia, urea and other petrochemicals plant at its existing facility at Onne, Rivers State, Nigeria.

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 metric tonnes per day (MT/day) of ammonia, 3,000 MT/day of urea and 1,500 MT/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 Metric Tonnes (MT)/annum ammonia and 500,000 MT/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 430,000MT of ammonia and 750,000MT 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 utilized 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 utilized for the petrochemicals production. The plant will create about 1,000 direct jobs and provide 10,500 indirect jobs nationwide. Over 2 million farmers would have access to the fertilisers which could mean a ten-fold increase of their harvest with a rippling contribution to Nigeria's GDP to over N300billion.