The UK’s Department of Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs and food and drinks industry groups, such as the British Meat Processors Association, are urging the UK government to intervene – as it did in September last year – in the impending temporary halt to ammonia production at CF Fertilisers UK’s Billingham Complex in northeast England in order to safeguard the country’s CO2supplies.
CF’s Billingham plant has the capacity to produce 750 mt of CO2per day, with currently some 42% of the UK’s CO2 supplies coming from Billingham. CO2is vital for many of the country’s food processing and drinks sectors, as well as the UK’s hospitals and nuclear power industry, among others.
The company, a subsidiary of the US’s CF Industries Holdings Inc., on Aug. 24 announced its intention to temporarily halt ammonia production at the Billingham Complex due to market conditions (GM Aug. 26, p.1). CF said it is still to determine the exact date when it will begin the temporary shutdown of the ammonia plant. It intends to use the site’s ability to import ammonia to enable it to continue to run its ammonium nitrate and nitric acid plants.
However, once the ammonia plant is halted, CO2 production, which is a byproduct of the ammonia production process, will stop until the plant is restarted.
In September 2021, when CF halted production at Billingham and at its other UK plant, at Ince, Cheshire, due to soaring energy costs, the UK government agreed to an exceptional three-week arrangement that provided “limited financial support” to CF and allowed the Billingham plant to restart (GM Sept. 24, 2021), while the company and its CO2 customers worked on a revised pricing deal.
Since last year’s outage, CF has permanently closed the smaller Ince plant (GM June 10, p.1). CF Fertilisers’ two plants accounted for as much as 60% of the UK’s CO2 requirements.
While UK meat processing sources reported the country is in a much better position now regarding CO2supplies than they were a year ago, they have “serious concerns” that if CF follows through on its decision to temporarily halt ammonia production at Billingham, without sufficient supplies of the gas the country will potentially face an animal welfare issue with a growing number of animals unable to be sent for processing.