Australia’s Strike Energy Ltd., Thebarton, South Australia, has decided to shelve its plan to build a $3 billion fertilizer plant known as Project Haber, and will instead focus on producing electricity.
Strike in 2021 announced plans to build Project Haber, an ammonia and urea complex for Western Australia’s Narngulu Industrial Estate, adjacent to Geraldton Port (GM Jan. 15, 2021). The complex envisioned a 1.4 million mt/y urea plant and an 800,000 mt/y ammonia plant using natural gas from Strike’s Greater Erregulla development in the Perth Basin via a 120-kilometer pipeline.
Strike brought its Walyering natural gas project in the northern Perth Basin online in September 2023. But Managing Director Stuart Nicholls said some of the company’s appraisals of existing gas resources at South Erregulla were unsuccessful, resulting in a “dramatically” lower estimate of the amount of gas available.
“Our ambitions to build a 1.4 million-tonne urea facility are ostensibly delayed for quite some time and will be subject only to being able to find additional gas resources and bring those to market,” he told local media.
Strike purchased farmland west of Three Springs for the urea plant and will now build a gas-powered peaking power plant at the location. Strike has submitted an application to the Australian Electricity Market Operator (AEMO) for the award of capacity credits and network access. If granted, Nicholls said the 85-megawatt peaking power station would be operational by October 2026.
In 2022 Strike was granted major project status by the federal government for Project Haber to streamline approvals and project support. The company in 2021 said it was in discussions with “several parties” for fertilizer offtake and equity agreements in the project, and said it planned to secure offtake agreements for up to 80% of the project before entering into front-end engineering and design (FEED) for the project.
At the time of the 2021 announcement, Strike estimated gross fertilizer revenues from Project Haber at A$540-A$700 million per year, or approximately $418-$542 million based on then-current exchange rates and urea prices in both wholesale and direct markets. Strike said the facility would be primarily focused on meeting the needs of Australian farmers, with surplus product to be made available to international markets.