Ammonia leak hospitalises 16 at Agrium plant in Texas

HOUSTON (ICIS)–An ammonia release late on 28 May at Agrium’s nitrogen facility in Borger, Texas, sent 16 contract workers to the hospital, the Canadian fertilizer producer confirmed on Friday.

Officials said they believe a failure in an ammonia pump caused the leak in the urea plant. They estimate about 80 pounds of ammonia was released.

The plant area was evacuated while the exposed workers were taken to area hospitals. The 16 contract workers were from Houston-based engineering firm KBR.

They were a part of the crews working on the $720m expansion project at the Texas nitrogen facility, which has both ammonia and urea operations.

The expansion will add a new urea production unit with a capacity of approximately 610,000 tonnes and increase the annual ammonia capacity to approximately 635,000 tonnes.

An Agrium spokesperson said 14 of the KBR employees have been released from the hospital, while the other two were kept overnight for observation. They were reportedly doing well.

KBR officials did not immediately respond to a request by ICIS for comment.

The producer said the minor release had no offsite impact on the surrounding area. The urea plant should be back online over the weekend. The ammonia plant was not impacted and continued to run normally.

The urea operations had just come back online after being down for several days after the facility suffered an unplanned outage on 18 May when a tube leaked inside a reformer in the ammonia plant.

The facility currently has an estimated capacity of 490,000 tonnes/year of ammonia and 100,000 tonnes/year of urea.