Australia's Latrobe Valley Selected as Site for $1.9 Billion Urea Plant

---

Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Australia is a country whose people boast of being inventive and doing things bigger than the next bloke. Well, Latrobe Valley is the selected site that will house both ideas in one plant. Australian Energy Company Limited (Melbourne, Australia) is cautiously moving forward with ambitious plans of building a $1.9 billion plant that will produce urea for fertilizer. One of the innovative aspects of this particular plant is the fact that the feedstock for urea production will be the process of gasifying brown coal found in the region.

The production capacity estimates range from 1.2 million metric tons per year to 1.35 million metric tons per year. This is four to five times more than Australia's current domestic urea production capacity of 280,000 metric tons per year and is right on target for what Australian farmers currently require. This will also turn Australia from an importer of urea to an exporter of the chemical.

The coal from Latrobe Valley was sent to Germany for testing to determine whether it could be converted into urea through clean-coal, low-emissions technology. The tests proved positive and it really opened the door for enthusiasm for more uses of the Latrobe Valley coal. The expected carbon-dioxide emissions of the plant will be approximately 1 million tons per year with the facility utilizing a geological storage infrastructure.

Construction of the plant is expected to commence in late 2009 or early 2010 with completion scheduled for early 2012. Australian Energy is looking at China and Germany to compete for the fabrication of the plant with local laborers actually constructing the site.

View Plant Profile - 1078986
View Project Report - 86000885

Industrial Info Resources (IIR) is a marketing information service specializing in industrial process, energy and financial related markets with products and services ranging from industry news, analytics, forecasting, plant and project databases, as well as multimedia services.