The EPC firm working on OCI’s world-scale nitrogen complex in Iowa was supposed to hand over the keys to the plant two years ago. While OCI is now operating and managing the site, the EPC firm is still there, finishing up, and the formal hand-over (“project acceptance”) hasn’t happened … despite the fact that OCI held a ribbon-cutting ceremony back in April.

Blame the opossum, who knocked out the power for a while. (I’m pretty sure electrical substations should be designed to withstand opossum attacks.)

The good news: downstream production above nameplate
According to the regular updates that OCI has posted to the Electronic Municipal Market Access website, to notify its bondholders, all the downstream units have been producing at rates above nameplate capacity. The UAN and urea granulation plants have both successfully run at 110% of capacity.

By the end of the first half of 2017, Wever had produced over 100,000 (short) tons of ammonia, over 50,000 tons of UAN, and almost 50,000 tons of granular urea.

The bad news: ongoing ammonia plant outages
Unfortunately, downstream production can only take place when the upstream plant is working – without ammonia, there is no urea or UAN production.

Rather than paraphrase, I’ll simply quote from the series of updates in OCI’s own words, starting the week after the “ribbon-cutting” ceremony and continuing up to last week.

• April 28: “The plant has now achieved ammonia production … The downstream plants have been declared mechanically complete and the various downstream production units are preparing for start-up utilizing IFCo-produced ammonia.”
• May 19: “The ammonia plant has been operating periodically during this startup phase due to various reasons including plant trips and tests expected during commissioning … The plant is currently operational and has achieved ammonia production rate above 90% of nameplate capacity … The urea granulation and UAN plants have been commissioned … However, the downstream plants were operating periodically due to the ammonia plant outages described above.”
• May 31: “All downstream units have been commissioned … However, the downstream plants are currently down as IFCo continues to perform various adjustments and corrections to address issues that arose during startup and prepare the plants for reliability and performance tests.”
• June 21: “The plant is currently operational and has achieved ammonia production rate above 95% of nameplate capacity … All downstream units have been commissioned and produced on spec product. The urea plant is down to replace a valve and because the granulator had one of the heads come off … The nitric acid plant is currently down due to valve repairs being performed.”
• July 7: “The plant was shut down on Monday, July 3rd … A high pressure boiler feed water leak on a chemical cleaning nozzle caused the plant to shut down. The leak was caused by a temporary gasket that was left in after pre-commissioning and had failed … Due to the ammonia plant shutdown, downstream plants are also currently down.”
• July 19: “The plant was started back up July 12th after being down due to a gasket leak. The ammonia plant is currently operating at 90% of nameplate capacity and producing 2,100 stpd.”
• July 31: “The [ammonia] plant tripped last week due to an animal entering the offsite utility-owned electrical substation and tripping the cooling water pumps. The utility company and IFCo have agreed to implement various measures to provide additional protection against similar incidents from occurring again. Upon restart there was an issue with one of the CO2 removal pumps … Due to the ammonia plant shutdown, downstream plants were also down.”
• August 15: The ammonia plant had been “down due to issues with the cooling water pumps and CO2 removal pumps. Upon restart the ammonia plant is operating at 95% of nameplate capacity and producing at a rate of 2,300 tpd.”
• August 30: “The ammonia plant tripped on August 17th after reaching 95% of nameplate capacity. It was determined that the purifier expander had broken linkage and needed to be sent … for repair in Houston. With Hurricane Harvey impacting the Houston area, the purifier repair has taken longer than expected … The ammonia plant is currently operating at 60% of nameplate capacity.”
• September 15: “The plant is currently operating above nameplate capacity. The ammonia plant has completed reliability testing pending final review/acceptance by IFCo, and is expected to begin performance testing within the next 2 weeks.”

Hopefully, all will be complete soon, and operating reliably. More information is always in my Research Note for Wever, IA.