Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Nov. 12 inaugurated the country’s largest urea plant, the Bangladesh Chemical Industries Corp.’s (BCIC) Ghorashal-Polash Urea Fertilizer Project (GPUFP) in the Narsingdi district in central Bangladesh, some 51 miles northeast of the capital of Dhaka.
The plant has an estimated daily production capacity of 2,800 mt of urea and 1,600 mt of ammonia, and will use natural gas feedstock. A consortium of Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. (MHI) and China National Chemical Engineering Seventh Construction Co Ltd. (CC7) is the EPC contractor for GPUFP. The project cost is put at $1.2 billion.
State-run BCIC first announced the project in October 2018, and originally was targeting the plant to be operational by 2022 (GM Dec. 13, 2019; Oct. 19, 2018). The new facility is replacing two of BCIC’s oldest plants, Urea Fertilizer Factory Ltd. and Polash Urea Fertilizer Ltd.
The plant will become the first urea plant in the country to capture all of the CO2 from the primary reformer flue gas, while other liquid effluent will be treated prior to discharge outside the plant site. By using the captured CO2, the production of urea will reportedly be increased by about 10%.