Deerfield, Ill. — CF Industries Holdings Inc. said late April 21 that its entire Woodward, Okla., nitrogen complex is offline due to a problem in one of the boilers. CF said all of the plants in the complex were safely shut down with no impact on personnel, the surrounding community, or the environment. CF estimates that it will take approximately 6 to 8 weeks to return the plant to normal operations. During the outage, the plant will execute the turnaround maintenance activities that had previously been scheduled for June. The Woodward complex has average annual production capacity for 480,000 st of gross ammonia, 820,000 st of UAN, and 25,000 st of urea liquor. “We are communicating with customers to work through product availability and delivery schedule implications,” a CF spokesperson told Green Markets. “CF Industries’ network of 74 in-market storage and distribution points is one of the unique advantages we have that helps us to serve our customers well, especially in situations like these.” Most sources said they saw no panic in the market due to the outage, indicating that UAN is more of a late season product and it does not appear to be in short supply. There appeared to be more of a crunch a few weeks ago when Agrium Inc. declared force majeure at its Carseland, Alta., plant (GM April 7, p. 1).
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