Azernews.Az

By Sara Israfilbayova

The urea (carbamide) plant of Azerbaijan’s state oil company SOCAR may produce about 50,000 tons of urea already this year.

The plant’s director Khayal Jafarov told reporters that the commissioning process is built in such a way that the plant will be able to operate at full capacity from day one, after the launch.

“The process of commissioning is underway,” Jafarov said. “Two weeks ago the plant began to receive natural gas and started steam production on May 30. A steam generator will be launched soon. All components of the equipment will be inspected in detail. This process will take about six months,” the director stressed.

He added that the demand for urea in Azerbaijan is about 150,000 tons per year.

He went on to say that within the project of construction of urea plant of Azerbaijani state company SOCAR, about 325-330 million euros from 500 million euros loan of foreign banks have been used.

Jafarov noted that, the main amount of payments will be made when SOCAR will take over the plant from Samsung.

“Ten percent of the plant’s value will be received upon completion of all work and upon acceptance of the plant [about 75 million euros]. Another 8 percent of the plant's value will be paid upon completion of mechanical work [about 50-56 million euros]. Therefore, there will be a large one-time payment. To date, about 325-330 million euros have already been used. Thus, about 120 million euros in large tranches, plus payment for the work that is performed will be used additionally” said Jafarov.

The plant will produce 1,200 tons of ammonia and, subsequently, 2,000 tons of urea per day. It is planned to supply a quarter of production, that is, 150,000-200,000 tons of urea, to the Azerbaijani domestic market. The remaining part will be exported 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.

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Sara Israfilbayova is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Sara_999Is

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