Port of Açu, the largest deep-water industrial port complex in Latin America, has signed a partnership with Japanese-Brazilian company Toyo Setal to jointly develop a nitrogen fertilizer plant at the company’s port site in São João da Barra, in northern Rio de Janeiro, according to Valor International and Port of Açu’s LinkedIn page.
The companies will work together in structuring, developing, licensing, and finding strategic investors for a future plant with an estimated capacity of 1.38 million mt/y of urea and 781,500 mt/y of ammonia.
The plant will use natural gas as the feedstock for the first phase, using Petrobras’s Route 3 gas pipeline, with the possibility of producing blue and green fertilizers from hydrogen in the next phases, Port of Açu said. This year, Port of Açu began the environmental permit process for a low-carbon hydrogen cluster in Açu with an installed capacity of 4 gigawatts.
“The partnership with Toyo Setal allows us to take a step forward in our strategy to establish Açu as a fertilizer production hub in Brazil, contributing to the expansion of domestic production and balancing our dependence on imports,” said José Firmo, CEO of Port of Açu.
Toyo Setal was founded in 2012 as a partnership between Japanese company Toyo Engineering Corp. and the Brazilian firm Setal Óleo e Gás. According to Valor International, Toyo Setal uses its own technology to produce urea and has partnerships with other companies to produce ammonia, with 87 ammonia and 112 urea projects currently in its global portfolio.
Port of Açu began handling fertilizers in 2021, Valor International reported, when it carried out the first operation in the state of Rio de Janeiro. The port has handled about 100,000 mt of fertilizer since then, and added two more warehouses this year, quadrupling storage capacity to 110,000 mt and doubling the terminal’s bonded area to 360,000 square meters.