Yara has announced that it is closing its 400,000 t/y ammonia plant at Tertre, Belgium. The ammonia feeds the nitrate and industrial products production.
“Yara Tertre is facing challenging market conditions, in combination with high and volatile energy prices and high maintenance costs, resulting in prolonged financial distress over recent years,” the company said in its statement.
Yara says the plant will run off ammonia brought in from other sites.
After the proposed transformation, Yara says the Tertre site will produce 600,000 tonnes of premium nitrate fertilizers and 250,000 tonnes of high added-value industrial products per year.
Gas prices have come down in European markets since the TTF price reached USD36/mmBTU in Q4 2022, having spiked even higher in the third quarter. European natural gas prices are currently USD 11-13/mmBTU, according to Trading View.
The increase in natural gas prices was largely a product of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in Q1 2022. However, temporary shutdowns of ammonia production across Europe had started to occur in Q4 2021 owing to an increase in natural gas prices.
The industry body Fertilizers Europe has tracked the closures. In Q4 of 2021 around 70% of the EU ammonia industry was temporarily closed. Between Q1-Q2 2023 around 40-50% of the EU ammonia industry was temporarily closed. In Q1 2024 the percentage was put at 10-20%.
Some of these temporary closures are becoming permanent, such as the ammonia plant at CF Industries’s Billingham site in the UK. The company will still produce nitrates at the plant from imported ammonia. Regarding other European closures, Fertilizer Europe said: “The most significant example is given by BASF’s closure of an ammonia plant in early 2023, which led to 2,600 people losing their jobs.”
In 2023, Yara’s curtailed its European ammonia production by 19%, despite its weighted-average gas costs more than halving compared with 2022.