San Francisco — While Iowa appears to be pulling out all the stops to lure the $1.5 billion nitrogen plant by Orascom Construction Industries (OCI), a much smaller nitrogen start-up, SynGest Inc., feels spurned by the state and vows to look elsewhere for a plant site. “The state made a rash decision to withdraw funding without ever having a conversation with anyone at our company,” SynGest CEO Jack Oswald told Green Markets. “We have moved on. When a state chooses to withdraw financial support for no good reason, as Iowa has done, and the way it has done it, it makes it unsafe for a business to continue operating in that state. If and when the current administration changes, we may re-consider.” Oswald is now looking at other states and hopes to have an announcement soon. Earlier this year, the Iowa Economic Development Authority (IEDA) cancelled a $2.5 million grant for the firm’s plant to produce energy and fertilizer from corn cobs (GM May 21, p. 15). IEDA said SynGest had defaulted on its state contract by failing to note in its application for the grant that SynGest Chairman Serge Randhava had been accused in a federal lawsuit in Illinois of racketeering and fraud related to his role in a previous research project involving fertilizer. SynGest says that its proposed $102 million initial plant, which would be built in Menlo, Iowa, would use 150,000 st/y of locally supplied corn cobs to manufacture 50,000 st/y of ammonia, enough to fertilize 500,000 acres of nearby Iowa farmland under corn. Oswald has said Iowa could accommodate 20 such ammonia plants. In the meantime, SynGest reports that it has lined up Matheson Gas, a unit of Japan’s Taiyo Nippon Sanso Corp., to supply 100 percent of the oxygen and nitrogen for SynGest’s worldwide ammonia and urea projects.
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