August 2014: Ammonia Capacity projection

North American ammonia capacity will double by 2019 if every project in development becomes operational.

This scenario would see capacity growing to 35.21 million metric tons per year in 2019, from 17.65 million mtpy in 2011.

This won’t happen, of course, because not every project will get financed.

What will happen is this: 5.67 million metric tons of ammonia will come online by 2019. This is the minimum capacity expansion we can expect.

Ammonia in North America: Capacity Projection, August 2014. Source: AmmoniaIndustry.com
Capacity Projection, August 2014
This number counts only those plants that I deem “likely” given today’s information. Tomorrow’s information will hold surprises: both cancellations and confirmations.

I expect major announcements soon from some of the big greenfields currently in development – as they confirm financing and break ground – bringing us to a probable total addition of about 10 million metric tons by 2019.

None of this counts any of the projects that have already been abandoned: more than 2.5 million metric tons of annual capacity have been cancelled in the last 15 months. Only the major players have abandoned their plans: Agrium, Yara, Mosaic, and Koch (Invista). So far.

Ammonia in North America: Capacity Projection, January 2014. Source: AmmoniaIndustry.com
Capacity Projection, January 2014
Since my last version of this chart in January 2014, another million or so new tons have been announced (by Simplot, who know what they’re doing, and AM Agrigen, who may or may not). Additionally, I caught omissions (Project N, and Invista before they cancelled), and I corrected some errors – see the Change Log for my long list of recent adjustments, in which I stopped rounding numbers and converted tons to tonnes properly.

Ammonia in North America: Capacity Projection, August 2014. Source: AmmoniaIndustry.com
Download a PDF of this graphic.

Note that “capacity” is not “production” – the actual amount of ammonia produced has historically been about 80% of capacity. Also note that this site uses a different methodology from most, and thus the numbers are a bit bigger: capacity is given for constant operations (365 days per year) not adjusted down, for outages and turnarounds, to an annual average production capability (for example, 340 days per year).

One comment

  1. Harshad P Pandya says:

    How is the market for non urea Ammonia. Country like India ,china are giving more emphasis on use of DAP/NPK . Petrochemical business in Canada and USA is growing rapidly This is likely to go up. This would require dedicated ammonia supply
    Any projections on this requirement ?

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