Holland-based OCI N.V. is on track to break ground on a 1.1 million tons per year (MTPA) blue ammonia facility next month.
The global producer and distributor of nitrogen products expects to use the recently established 45Q tax incentive for carbon capture and sequestration at the facility, which will amount to a benefit of roughly $119m per year “that we can utilize to offset taxes or sell to third parties,” CEO Ahmed El-Hoshy said on the company’s 3Q22 earnings call.
In addition to the tax incentives, the project benefits from access to US Gulf Coast natural gas, he added.
El-Hoshy said the plant will be the first world-scale low-carbon ammonia project to commission when it comes online in 2025.
It will require $450m of capex in 2023 and “sub $1bn” in total, and will utilize existing infrastructure at the Beaumont site to export ammonia to the US Midwest fertilizer market as well as the US Gulf Coast’s growing clean ammonia market, El-Hoshy said.
Key infrastructure at the site has been designed to allow for a doubling of capacity to 2.2 MTPA in the future.
The facility will also have strategic supply advantages for the European Union via the company’s Rotterdam terminal, where throughput capacity is expected to triple to 1.2 MTPA by 2023.
