OCI NV reported that it has a project scheduled to come online at the beginning of 2024 to add 300,000 mt of Diesel Exhaust Fuel (DEF) for a 100,000 mt of urea equivalent at OCI Nitrogen to improve margins in the Netherlands.
“For us, it is a question of finding the customer base that we can securely get to and investing in some of the logistics,” OCI NV and Fertiglobe CEO Ahmed El-Hoshy told analysts at an OCI earnings call on Feb. 14.
“There are constraints around our sites [where DEF is produced] with regards to water availability, but we have been focused on incrementally pushing up capacity, ” he told analysts.
“At the Iowa Fertilizer Co., for example, the nameplate capacity for DEF was approximately 300,000 mt/y when we brought the plant online in 2017. And now we have achieved over 1 million mt/y of DEF and could potentially go to 1.3 million mt/y of DEF out of the site,” El-Hoshy said.
Fertiglobe, the OCI NV- Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. (ADNOC) Middle Eastern ammonia and urea joint venture, on Feb. 14 reported that it made trial shipments of Diesel Exhaust Fuel (DEF/AdBlue) from Egypt to Europe in the fourth quarter of 2022 and early 2023, and expects to deliver more shipments over the course of this year (see Fertiglobe earnings story).
OCI said it sold 917,200 mt of DEF last year, a 50% increase over 2021’s sale volumes of 612,000 mt.