NEXTCHEM awarded €485 million contract for West African fertilizer complexes

MAIRE has announced that NEXTCHEM, through its subsidiaries Stamicarbon and KT Tech, has been awarded licensing, process design package (PDP), and critical equipment supply contracts for the development of three world scale complexes, two of them dedicated to urea granules production and one integrating ammonia and methanol co-production, for a major client in West Africa.

The contracts are all based on NEXTCHEM’s proprietary technologies. The overall package is worth €485 million, of which €10 million related to engineering activities already started will be recognised in the pre-FID phase, while the remaining part at final investment decision (FID).

The two large scale nitrogen fertilizer plants will consist of four hydrogen units based on the NX AdWinHydrogen^® technology, four ammonia units based on the NX STAMI™ Ammonia technology, four urea-melt trains and six urea-granulation units based on the NX STAMI™ Urea technology for an overall urea production above 3 million tpy.

The NX AdWinHydrogen autothermal reforming (ATR) is a technology to efficiently produce syngas at the scale needed for downstream plants. Ammonia units will utilise the NX STAMI™ Ammonia technology for efficient, reliable and flexible large scale production. The NX STAMI™ Urea technology is aimed at reducing steam consumption and improving energy efficiency while producing high-quality urea granules.

The third plant combines ammonia, for above 900 000 tpy, and methanol, for above 600 000 tpy production. One of the units will be designed to co-produce methanol and ammonia thanks to NEXTCHEM’s ATR-based NX AdWin^® Combined technology. NX AdWin Combined is a large scale high-pressure ATR technology for sequential/parallel methanol and ammonia production.

The NX AdWinHydrogen and the NX AdWin Combined technologies are both developed by GasConTec, NEXTCHEM’s subsidiary dedicated to low-carbon hydrogen and methanol solutions.

Fabio Fritelli, Managing Director of NEXTCHEM, commented: “This is a landmark award, which leverage on NEXTCHEM’s integrated expertise across the hydrogen, ammonia, urea, and methanol value chains. It reinforces our position as a leading technology partner for large, integrated industrial projects, demonstrating the scalability and complementarity of our proprietary technologies.”