What is the current status of the ammonia synthesis industry?

Since BASF built the world's first synthesis ammonia plant in 1911, synthesis ammonia technology has made great progress. The production capacity of a single set of synthesis ammonia plant has been developed from 1500t per year to 900,000 tonnes per year, the pressure of ammonia synthesis tower has been reduced from 100MPaG to 15MPaG, and the energy consumption per unit has been reduced from 78GJ to 27.2GJ, which is close to the theoretical limit of 20.1GJ. The world's first set of synthesis ammonia plant adopts the electrolysis of chlor-alkali industry to produce hydrogen, and ammonia is produced through the combustion of hydrogen gas in air. Nowadays, the main raw materials of ammonia industry are natural gas and oil field gas and other gaseous hydrocarbons, residual oil, coal and so on. Synthesis process also changes with the different raw materials: for natural gas and oilfield gas and other gaseous hydrocarbons, using air-water vapour as the gasification agent steam conversion method; for residual oil, oxygen-water vapour as the gasification agent for the partial oxidation method: for coal, oxygen-water vapour pressurized gasification method.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the rapid development of fertiliser industry, the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Japan and other old capitalist countries to produce a large number of fertilizers, not only to meet the domestic demand, but also a large number of exports, ammonia raw materials during this period are mainly natural gas and light oil. In the mid-seventies, the oil crisis broke out, the price of natural gas and light oil took advantage of the situation to soar, the cost of synthetic ammonia plants in the above countries can no longer compete in the international market. At the same time, resource-rich countries, such as Russia, Mexico, Canada, the rapid rise of the ammonia industry, the new hundreds of thousands of tonnes or even millions of tonnes of annual production capacity of large-scale synthetic ammonia enterprises will be converted from resource advantages into product advantages, ammonia fertiliser exports to developed countries. At the beginning of the founding of the country, China has only two fertiliser plants in Nanjing and Dalian, with an annual output of about 6,000 tonnes; in the seventies, with the development of the oil and gas industry, China has successively introduced 16 sets of synthetic ammonia plants with a daily output of 1,000 tonnes from abroad, using natural gas, light oil, residual oil as raw materials and one set of coal as raw material. In the nineties, many sets of world-advanced synthetic ammonia plants with energy-saving technology were introduced, and now China's synthetic ammonia industry ranks first in the world in terms of output, and it has mastered the technology of using various raw materials such as natural gas, paraffin and coal. With the rapid development of China's basic industries, the level of China's synthesis ammonia technology providers has been among the world's forefront, and the important equipment has been able to be completely localised. Nanjing Jutuo, Nanjing Guochang and other Chinese technology providers have been able to supply a single set of 600,000 tonnes / year of ammonia synthesis tower parts, Shen Drum Group, Shaanxi Drum Group, etc., also has the ability to provide gas compressors for large ammonia enterprises.