Oklahoma City — LSB Industries Inc. said Nov. 6 that it is revising its cost estimate for its El Dorado, Ark., expansion to $831-$855 million from the latest update in August of $660-$680 million. “The primary reason for the further cost escalation relates to mechanical and piping labor costs increases versus earlier estimates,” said Daniel Greenwell, LSB interim CEO. LSB announced a strategic investment of $260 million to complete the expansion. This investment, from Security Benefit Corp., will be in the form of debt and equity. The ammonia plant is expected to be mechanically complete in February 2016. As for the new nitric acid plant and concentrator, LSB said the concentrator went into production in June 2015, and the nitric acid plant is expected to be in production the week of Nov. 9. LSB also announced that it has inked a three-year offtake agreement with Koch Fertilizer for all of the excess ammonia from the El Dorado ammonia plant. In the meantime, an unplanned outage at the Pryor, Okla., plant impacted third-quarter earnings. The Chemical segment had an operating loss of $55 million on net sales of $80.6 million, compared to the year-ago loss of $5.6 million and $94.8 million, respectively. The unit had a nine-month loss of $31.5 million on sales of $320 million compared to year-ago income of $46.8 million and $345 million, respectively. Company-wide, LSB reported a third-quarter net loss of $33.8 million ($1.48 per diluted share) on net sales of $157.7 million, compared to a year-ago loss of $3.8 million $(0.17 per share) and $171 million, respectively. LSB had a nine-month net loss of $26.7 million ($1.19 per share) on sales of $534.2 million, compared to year-ago income of $19 million ($0.80 per share) on sales of $551.2 million.
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