Denver-A U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 8 emergency response team is supposed to decide in the next week or so what to do with 170,000 to 200,000 pounds of AMFO mixtures as part of the cleanup of a Utah site that could put the agency briefly in the fertilizer business. Lead coordinator Paul Peronard is working with the Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands to get the 480-acre Cook Slurry Co. property near Utah Lake in shape for resale to resolve a lease dispute with the explosives business owner – former Utah Congressman Merrill Cook, son of Melvin Cook, who invented AMFO explosives. “We want to have the land marketable – something that a buyer wants to buy,” Tom Mitchell, one of the state agency’s legal advisers, remarked recently. Peronard told Green Markets, “It’s EPA’s intention to reuse all this stuff one way or another.” He indicated that the first choice probably is to work with other explosives manufacturers in this area and have them take and reuse it. “But Plan B is to separate out the ammonium nitrate and use it as fertilizer,” he suggested. “We’re trying to determine which makes more economic sense to us. We don’t have to make money on this, just to defer costs of the disposal process.” He said what’s at the site, located not far from a cluster of subdivisions, has been there at least 10 years and represents very little pure ammonium nitrate. “There’s a total of eight tanks on the property, but the bulk of the material is in two large tanks of a liquid/solid and something in between. One of them has four pretty definite layers of liquid oil, a jelly-like material and a layer of ammonium nitrate salts. The other tank is mostly in two layers … one of oil and the other slurry.” Right now, Peronard reported, discussions will be held with local explosives companies “to see if that’s going to work or not.”
Transparency Across the Fertilizer Value-Chain