JULY - SEPTEMBER 202319CHEMICAL INDUSTRY REVIEWEMBRACING SUSTAINABILITY WITH AMMONIA AS GREEN ENERGYBy Trevor Williams, Senior Vice President, Nitrogen Operations, NutrienFirst question is something about the topic of interest about the future of clean ammonia for manufacturing. Could you talk to me about reducing carbon footprint and how Ammonia could play a significant role in a green energy future? I'm a chemical engineer by background. I've spent most of my career in the chemical and agricultural industry. A couple of years ago, we started to look from an environment, social and governance (ESG) principles, and sustainability perspective. We want to set targets and goals for ourselves as we look to decarbonize not only just our company, but learning how to contribute to the decarbonization of the agro sector and chemical industry in general. Initially, we really looked internally in terms of initially reducing our scope one and scope two emissions. To modify existing facilities that we have in 11 ammonia plants across our organization, they are all traditional technology. So we really looked at what could we do to reduce the energy footprint, what could we do to reduce CO2 emissions? In a big part of that, early on we collaborated in Alberta as well as in Louisiana with a couple of companies that were doing sequestration for enhanced oil recovery at a facility in Redwater, Alberta. We also have experience in the Geismar, Louisiana plant, where an internal ammonia process creates CO2 of a very high purity and quality and compresses it, later utilizing it for enhanced oil recovery and important in terms of expanding our two facilities. Beyond that we set ourselves the goal to reduce our carbon emissions by 30% from an intensity basis using a 2018 baseline to get us to 2030. As we look at more future opportunities, we could develop a plant with a goal to capture up to 95% of the CO2 production and compress it, and then either sequester it from a CO2 sequestration process. Ammonia has an important nutrient benefits from an industrial energy side, and decarbonization of other industrial products, or industrial customers to reduce CO2 emissions. There are multiple possibilities, and based on that, we searched for technologies offering us the potential to hit that goal. We started developing our "Clean ammonia project," working with a technology provider site called ThyssenKrupp Uhde technology from Germany. We were looking at what we could do in terms of developing and partnering with ThyssenKrupp Uhde technology in developing a scope that would allow us to be able to achieve that reduction, and that's what we've proposed for clean ammonia project.CXO INSIGHTSTrevor Williams
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