Incitec Pivot Ltd. (IPL), Southbank, Victoria, confirmed on July 13 that its Waggaman, La., ammonia plant restarted and reached full production on June 1, and has since produced nameplate volumes. The Waggaman facility has a nameplate capacity of 800,000 mt/y of ammonia.
Waggaman was offline for a total of 14.5 weeks in IPL’s fiscal first-half, which runs to March 31 (GM May 21, p. 27; May 14, p. 1; April 9, p. 1; Feb. 19, p. 33). The downtime resulted from a combination of planned major turnaround activity and other unplanned outages.
Since then, the plant’s restart process – after it went down again on March 17 as a result of a dry gas seal failure and vibrations in the turbine on the induced draft fan – was halted on May 8, with the restart and subsequent repairs taking three weeks.
As previously announced by the company, an outage of up to three weeks is expected at the Waggaman plant during FY2022 or FY2023 to allow for the installation of a new ammonia cooler.
IPL also reported on July 13 that all of its fiscal first-half plant turnarounds are complete, with the Moranbah, Queensland, ammonium nitrate plant “running reliably.” The Moranbah plant began a scheduled major turnaround in early May.
The company will provide a further operational update on July 29.
IPL this week also provided an update on its manufacturing model and related management changes (see Management Briefs).