SOCAR plans to use BTK railway for carbamide export
By Sara Israfilbayova
Azerbaijan’s energy giant SOCAR plans to use the Baku-Tbilisi – Kars (BTK) railway for carbamide (urea) supplies to Georgia and Turkey.
Director of the carbamide plant Khayal Jafarov said that SOCAR is not afraid of high competition in the urea market, despite the construction of factories in Russia and Turkmenistan.
“Our main market is Turkey. We studied it and found out that the main deliveries of carbamide to Turkey come from Egypt and partly from Russia. However, we have such advantage as logistics. In addition, after 2020, the demand for urea will grow everywhere,” said Jafarov.
He mentioned the recently launched BTK railway, stressing that it will make it possible to quickly deliver goods from Azerbaijan to Georgia and Turkey.
The production capacity of the plant will be about 650,000-660,000 tons per year. About 150,000-200,000 tons of carbamide is planned to be supplied to the domestic market . The remaining volumes will be exported, in particular to Turkey, Georgia and the markets of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea countries.
South Korea’s Samsung Engineering won the tender for the construction of the carbamide plant. Samsung Engineering acts as a general contractor of the plant’s construction, but it has no license for production of carbamide and ammonia, which will be by-product in the carbamide production process. Therefore, the relevant licensing agreements were signed with Haldor Topsoe company (Denmark) for production of ammonia and Stamicarbon B.V. company (the Netherlands) for production of carbamide.
Production at the plant will be environmentally friendly. The entire control system will be fully automated and will meet the highest requirements, including in terms of safety.
The carbamide plant will need 1.5 million cubic meters of gas per day to full capacity.
The commissioning of the plant will cease dependence of Azerbaijan on the import of nitrogen fertilizers, and it can be confidently asserted that in 2018 carbamide will become one of the weighty items of Azerbaijan's non-oil export.
The carbamide plant will strengthen the non-oil sector of Azerbaijan, and due to the localization of production will allow to spend the saved currency for other needs. It is extremely important that significant volumes of carbamide production contribute to the increase of the export potential of the country, which will bring additional revenues to the budget and give impetus to the development of the non-oil sector.
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Sara Israfilbayova is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Sara_999Is
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