60 Ammonia Plants and counting (download them all)

by Trevor Brown

This week, I published the data that drives AmmoniaIndustry.com as an Excel download.

This is a list of all the North American ammonia plants and their capacities, existing and announced. You can see what data I’ve included and download the Excel file here.

I’ll be posting updated versions of this file on a monthly basis, so if I could make this data more useful to you in the future, just let me know what adjustments you’d like to see.

I’m licensing this dataset – and all of the original content on AmmoniaIndustry.com – under a Creative Commons Attribution license – which means that you can use and reuse part or all of it in any way, for any purpose, as long as you attribute this site as the source.

The download is only available to Members because I’d like this website to provide value directly to its visitors (rather than selling its visitors to advertisers). Membership is immediate, and the income allows me to put more time into maintaining and expanding the site.

You may have noticed that lots of the pages on this site now have sections that are for Members only – particularly my research notes, which aim to provide general coverage of what’s important to know about a project. If you’d like to see an example, try the page for US Nitrogen, which I’ve left open to all – because there seems to be a lot of public interest in this project and it has perhaps the most convoluted narrative of all the ammonia plants now in development.

9 comments

    • Trevor Brown says:

      Hi Mark,

      Fascinating challenge. I thought the answer was an easy “yes” but it’s more complicated than that.

      First off, USGS is an excellent resource and I cite them as my data source in various places in the spreadsheet – especially for private companies (Koch), or companies so big that their ammonia production barely merits a mention anywhere else (Honeywell). You can see their exact list of active/idle plants here: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/nitrogen/myb1-2011-nitro.pdf (latest data is for 2011, see Table 4)

      USGS’s methodology and mine are different, however: they adjust annual capacity data to 340 days per year production; I adjust mine to 365 days per year production. Also, note that their 8.7 million metric tons is NOT ammonia production but nitrogen production (exactly how they calculate this I’m not sure, but I’d guess it’s a simple ratio based on ammonia = 82% nitrogen).

      Now, here’s what’s in that link you’re working from:

      USGS cites 13 companies producing in 2013: these thirteen are Agrium, CF Industries, CVR Partners, Dakota Gas, Dyno Nobel, Green Valley Chemical, Honeywell, Koch Industries, LSB, Mosaic, Orascom, PotashCorp, and Rentech.

      USGS cites 15 states producing in 2013: these fifteen are AL, GA, IA, IL, KS, LA, MS, ND, NE, OH, OK, OR, TX, VA, and WY.

      USGS cites 2 idle plants: I think that these are Koch’s plant in Sterlington, LA, and Agrium’s plant in Kennewick, WA – for some reason, they don’t include Agrium’s idle (but possibly restarting) plant in Kenai, AK.

      USGS cites 28 active ammonia plants. I’m having trouble matching that count. I have 24 (not including the wind-to-ammonia plant in Morris, MN, which I’m pretty sure USGS wasn’t counting, although they know it’s there).

      My best guess for the discrepancy is that USGS might be counting plants within a single location as separate, for example the former Terra Nitrogen plant that is now part of CF Industries’ Donaldsonville complex. I count these separate plants as one. I’ll ask them.

      I don’t think I’m missing any ammonia plants – but am I wrong?

      Best,
      T.

      • Trevor Brown says:

        Hi Mark,

        Update, with feedback from the awesome Lori Apodaca at USGS.

        My count of 24 ammonia plants matches the USGS count of 28 ammonia plants. The discrepancy simply comes from how we account for multiple plants at one site – specifically: CF Industries’ Donaldsonville and Verdigris locations.

        So, with the exception of projects that came online since 2013, you can see the USGS list and my list reflected here: https://ammoniaindustry.com/ammonia-plants-in-north-america-up-and-running/

        All the best,
        T.

  4. Tshering Lhendup says:

    I just wanted to know how difficult to erect new plant smallest
    plant and what will be the cost. say roughly

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