Qatar’s Qafco shuts down two ammonia plants on technical woes

Richard Ewing

25-Mar-2015

QatarLONDON (ICIS)–Qatar Fertiliser Company (Qafco) is hunting spot ammonia cargoes for April loading after technical issues forced its two largest ammonia plants offline, a source at marketing agency Muntajat revealed on Wednesday.

The supplier is seeking spot cargoes from producers such as SABIC in Saudi Arabia after the Qafco 5 plant suffered an unscheduled shutdown on 21 March.

Production is not expected to resume until 4 April, said the source, with the situation compounded by a fresh delay in the restart of the Qafco 6 ammonia unit.

The Qafco 6 plant was due to return to service on 16 March after an unplanned outage in February, but is not now expected to come back online until 31 March.

Urea production at both plants, which each produce up to 2,000 tonnes of ammonia and 3,850 tonnes of urea per day, continues at reduced rates, the source said.

He added the Qafco 3 ammonia and urea plant is expected to resume production on 31 March following a scheduled three-week turnaround that began earlier this month.

State-owned Muntajat handles the marketing activities for all Qafco ammonia and urea, with the technical issues meaning it will need to find alternative sources of ammonia for its contract commitments as ammonia inventory will be consumed as feedstock for urea.

Muntajat sells most of its merchant ammonia to long term agricultural and industrial customers in India, as well as buyers in Jordan and South Africa.

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