Northern Nutrients Ltd., a crop nutrition company based in Saskatoon, Sask., announced on June 24 that it plans to build a manufacturing facility for sulfur-enhanced urea that will utilize Shell Thiogro technology, a patented process that incorporates micronized elemental sulfur into urea.
Construction at a site outside of Saskatoon will begin in July 2021, with expected completion in early 2022. Ross Guenther, President and Co-owner of Northern Nutrients, said the plant will have a production capacity of 56,000 mt/y, with 7,000 mt of onsite storage. Northern Nutrients is licensing the Shell Thiogro technology, and has been importing patented Shell sulfur urea into North America for three years.
“The adoption of the products by producers and the anticipated increasing demand has convinced us to produce our own form of the sulfur-enhanced urea in Canada,” Guenther said, noting that usage of the product among Northern Nutrients’ customers in North America has increased 15-fold since the first commercial season in the spring of 2019.
“We first tried the sulfur product three years ago, and all our growers who have tried it have increased their acres and moved all of their sulfur requirements over to the Shell micronized sulfur urea product,” said Northern Nutrients Co-owner Matt Owens. “They like the product (11-0-0-75) because it is readily available to the plant early and throughout the growing season, it mixes well in any dry blend, and it has a low salt index compared to other forms of sulfur.”
Rob Owens, another co-owner of Northern Nutriens, who also serves as President and General Manager of Emerge Ag Solutions, an independent crop input retail business in Eston, Sask., said the lower salt index in the product is a good fit for Western Canada. He added that the product is much less dusty than ammonium sulfate, and can be applied safely in the seed row, resulting in time savings for growers.
“Once we saw how our customers responded to it, we thought we’d like to invest in the company, so we are very optimistic about what the sulfur product and the new phosphorus product could mean for farmers,” he said. “We are very excited to bring these products to dealers and farmers in the West.”
Northern Nutrients was founded in the Netherlands in 2016 as a distributor of low salt and sustainable fertilizers. The Canada-based company Northern Nutrients Ltd. began operations in 2018 as the North American marketing and distribution partner for Korean sulfur-based fertilizer producer H Sulphur’s Super S (11-0-0-75) sulfur and urea fertilizer product (GM June 29, 2018).
Houston-based Shell launched its UreaPlusS sulfur-enhanced urea in 2015 (GM May 18, 2015), following the earlier release of its Thiogro phosphates technologies, which enables producers to incorporate micron-sized particles of elemental sulfur and other nutrients into products such as MAP, DAP, TSP, and NPKs.