CF Industries Holdings Inc.’s Woodward, Okla., plant was still idled from an April shutdown when a small fire erupted at the facility June 20.
CF had reported April 21 that the entire complex was shut down due to a problem in one of the boilers. At the time, CF estimated the plants would be down 6-8 weeks. During the outage, the plant has been executing the turnaround maintenance activities that had previously been scheduled for June. The Woodward complex has average annual production capacity for 480,000 tons of gross ammonia, 820,000 tons of UAN, and 25,000 tons of urea liquor.
“CF Industries is conducting an internal investigation into the cause of a minor fire which occurred last Friday morning at its Woodward, Oklahoma, nitrogen complex,” the company told Green Markets. “Although emergency services were called as a precautionary measure, the fire was quickly extinguished by plant personnel and there were no injuries or impact to employees or the local community. It is too soon to know the impact, if any, this incident may have on the process of bringing the plant back on-stream. We will restart the plant when we believe it is safe and prudent to do so and remain in contact with our customers about the resumption of production and deliveries from the facility.”