A New Urea Process slated for its commercial debut

Stamicarbon B.V. (Sittard, the Netherlands; www.stamicarbon.com), the licensing and IP Center of Maire Tecnimont S.p.A. (www.mairetecnimont.it), has recently signed a license agreement with Tierra del Fuego Energia Y Quimica S.A., an Argentina based company controlled by shareholders from China. The agreement concerns a urea synthesis plant and a urea granulation plant with a capacity of 2,700 metric tons per day to be built in southern Argentina.

The plants will be located near the city Rio Grande in Tierra del Fuego. Stamicarbon will deliver the process design package, the proprietary high-pressure equipment, and associated services for both the synthesis and the granulation plant. The plants will be built by Chengda Engineering Corp. of China (Chengda; www.chengda.com). Start up is planned for 2013.
The urea synthesis plant will use the Stamicarbon Avancore urea technology, marking the commercial debut for this process.

Avancore (flowsheet) is a further development of Stamicarbon’s Urea 2000plus technology, and reduces the required plant height to just 22 m (even for large-scale plants) thereby “considerably” reducing the investment costs. According to Stamicarbon, Avancore incorporates major improvements in the core urea technology that have led to the elimination of several traditional equipment items (and the associated costs), including the following:

• Use of Safurex stainless steel — an improved duplex steel developed with Sandvik Materials Technology (Sandviken, Sweden; www.smt.sandvik.com) — the air supply for passivation is no longer required
• The absence of oxygen means there is no need to combust hydrogen, so the H2 converter is eliminated and the synthesis section has become intrinsically safe with respect to explosion risks
• With the quantity of inert gas substantially reduced, less gas has to be vented from the
• urea synthesis section, so the high-pressure (HP) scrubber can be replaced by a medium-pressure (MP) scrubber

Fuente: CHEMICAL ENGINEERING ♦ WWW.CHE.COM ♦ JULY 2011