Saudi Chemical Holding Co. announced on Feb. 27 that its subsidiary Saudi Chemical Co. Ltd., in partnership with a local company, has received a gas allocation letter from the Kingdom’s Ministry of Energy for establishing a plant to produce nitric acid and ammonium nitrate (AN).
The facility will have capacity to produce 440,000 mt/y of nitric acid and 300,000 mt/y of AN, the company said in a filing to the Saudi stock exchange.
The plant will be the first of its kind in the region, and the output will provide raw materials for several downstream industries in the domestic market, including industries in the mining and exploration sector, construction and infrastructure, cement production, and also pharmaceutical industries, Saudi Chemical Co. said.
Saudi Chemical Co. did not name the local company in its filing. However, in January it signed a nonbinding Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Orica Mining Services (Portugal) “to establish cooperation to localize the production of AN and nitric acid” (GM Jan. 20, p. 27).