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Economy

Facing green push on farm, fertilizer makers look to sea for growth

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By Rod Nickel and Victoria Klesty

WINNIPEG, Manitoba/OSLO (Reuters) – Two of the world’s biggest fertilizer producers, CF Industries Holdings Inc and Yara International Asa, are seeking to cash in on the green energy transition by reconfiguring ammonia plants in the United States and Norway to produce clean energy to power ships.

The consumption of oil for transportation is one of the top contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, and fertilizer producers join a growing list of companies adjusting their business models to profit from a future lower-carbon economy.

By altering the production process for ammonia normally usedfor fertilizer, the companies told Reuters they can producehydrogen for fuel or a form of carbon-free ammonia usedeither as a carrier for hydrogen or as a marine fuel topower cargo and even cruise ships.

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The shift may improve their standing with environment-minded investors as fertilizer emissions attract greater government scrutiny in North America and Europe.

But the green fuels are not yet commercial and willrequire significant investment to turn a profit – a realitythat has the world’s largest fertilizer producer, Canada’s Nutrien Ltd, staying out of the space for now. Oslo-based Yara is seeking government subsidies to proceed.

Still, renewable ammonia represents a 6 billion-euro ($7.25 billion) opportunity for fertilizer producers by 2030, according to Citibank, based on 20 million tonnes of annual sales globally for clean power and shipping fuel compared with virtually none now. Global ammonia sales currently amount to 180 million tonnes.

“We absolutely could be known more for being aclean energy company than an ag supplier,” CF ChiefExecutive Tony Will said in an interview, speaking of long-term prospects for the Illinois-based company.

 

‘EVERYBODY IS LOOKING FOR SOLUTIONS’

Fertilizer plants separate hydrogen from natural gas and combine it with nitrogen taken from the air to make ammonia, which farmers inject into soil to maximize crop growth.

Production generates carbon emissions that CF says it can avoid by extracting hydrogen instead from water charged with electricity. It can then combine that hydrogen with nitrogen to make green ammonia, which the marine industry is testing as fuel.

CF is in discussions about selling green ammonia to a Japanese power consortium including Mitsubishi Corp, but buyers will break most of it down to pure hydrogen for use in transportation sectors.

“This is a market that easily can exceed what the total ammonia (fertilizer) market is,” Will said. “We’re going to grow into that over the next 20-25 years.”

Adopting green ammonia or green hydrogen to replace crude oil-based fuel would help the International Maritime Organization (IMO) meet a target to reduce emissions, and is suited to both short- and long-haul vessels.

Methanol and liquefied natural gas (LNG) are other clean alternatives.

“Everybody is looking for solutions and I think the jury is still out,” said Tore Longva, alternative fuels expert at Oslo-based maritime advisor DNV GL. “Of all the fuels, (green ammonia) is probably the one that we are slightly more optimistic on, but it’s by no means a given.”

Ammonia remains toxic and corrosive, requiring special handling on ships, Longva said.

Furthermore, combusting ammonia may produce nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, that ships would need to neutralize to prevent emissions, said Faig Abbasov, shipping director for European Federation for Transport and Environment, an umbrella group of non-governmental organizations. Fuel cells are another potential marine use for ammonia and hydrogen.

Still, Abbasov sees ammonia and hydrogen as the greenest and most practical shipping fuel alternatives, and cheaper than methanol.

Development of ammonia and hydrogen for shipping fuel holds decarbonization potential but is at the pilot stage for small vessels, while LNG and methanol are in use on ocean-going ships, an IMO spokeswoman said.

South Korea’s Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, one of the world’s biggest shipbuilders, plans to commercialize super-large container ships powered by ammonia by 2025, a spokesman said.

 

THE PLANS

CF is reconfiguring its Donaldsonville, Louisiana, plant to produce green ammonia. It plans to spend $100 million initially to enable the plant to produce by 2023, about 18,000 tonnes. By 2026, production across its network could reach 450,000 tonnes, and 900,000 tonnes by 2028, Will said.

The hydrogen it will sell may have nearly 10 times the margin of ammonia fertilizer, according to CF, making the 75-year-old farm company’s newest product its most profitable.

Yara is developing a green ammonia project with power company Orsted in the Netherlands and also has green projects running in Australia and Norway.

Unlike CF, Yara is seeking government subsidies because green ammonia costs could be 2-4 times higher than conventional production, said Terje Knutsen, Yara’s head of Farming Solutions.

“The technology behind this is not mature enough today,” he said.

Yara, which aims to cut all CO2 emissions from its 500,000 tonnes-a-year Porsgrunn ammonia plant in Norway, wants funding from the Norwegian government to switch the plant’s production process to electricity by 2026.

Norway already supports hydrogen and green ammonia through a tax exemption on electricity used to produce hydrogen, Minister of Climate and Environment Sveinung Rotevatn said in an email.

“Hydrogen and hydrogen-based solutions, such as ammonia, will be important in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the future,” Rotevatn said.

Global ammonia production would need to multiply five-fold if it is to replace all oil-based shipping fuel, Abbasov said. But given the abundance of nitrogen in the air, potential supply is almost unlimited if production costs drop, he said.

Nutrien is looking into green ammonia, but sees high costs and insufficient prices as major obstacles, Chief Executive Chuck Magro said.

Industry efforts underway to produce small volumes of green ammonia are largely “window-dressing,” said Nutrien Executive Vice-President, Nitrogen, Raef Sully.

“The reason (for Nutrien) to look at it is to position ourselves for when people are willing to pay,” Sully said.

“The problem is we’re just right at the start of development.”

 

(Reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg, Manitoba and Victoria Klesty in Oslo; additional reporting by Jonathan Saul in London; Editing by Caroline Stauffer and Marguerita Choy)

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Economy

Yellen Sounds Alarm on China ‘Global Domination’ Industrial Push – Bloomberg

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US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen slammed China’s use of subsidies to give its manufacturers in key new industries a competitive advantage, at the cost of distorting the global economy, and said she plans to press China on the issue in an upcoming visit.

“There is no country in the world that subsidizes its preferred, or priority, industries as heavily as China does,” Yellen said in an interview with MSNBC Wednesday — highlighting “massive” aid to electric-car, battery and solar producers. “China’s desire is to really have global domination of these industries.”

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Opinion: The future economy will suffer if Canada axes the carbon tax – The Globe and Mail

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Open this photo in gallery:

Poilievre holds a press conference regarding his “Axe the Tax” message from the roof a parking garage in St. John’s on Oct.27, 2023.Paul Daly/The Canadian Press

Kevin Yin is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail and an economics doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley.

The carbon tax is the single most effective climate policy that Canada has. But the tax is also an important industrial strategy, one that bets correctly on the growing need for greener energy globally and the fact that upstart Canadian companies must rise to meet these needs.

That is why it is such a shame our leaders are sacrificing it for political gains.

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The fact that carbon taxes address a key market failure in the energy industry – polluters are not incentivized to consider the broader societal costs of their pollution – is so well understood by economists that an undergraduate could explain its merits. Experts agree on the effectiveness of the policy for reducing emissions almost as much as they agree on climate change itself.

It is not just that pollution is bad for us. That a patchwork of policies supporting clean industries is proliferating across the United States, China and the European Union means that Canada needs its own hospitable ecosystem for clean-energy companies to set up shop and eventually compete abroad. The earlier we nurture such industries, the more benefits our energy and adjacent sectors can reap down the line.

But with high fixed costs of entry and non-negligible technological hurdles, domestic clean energy is still at a significant disadvantage relative to fossil fuels.

A nuclear energy company considering a reactor project in Canada, for example, must contend with the fact that the upfront investments are enormous, and they may not pay off for years, while incumbent oil and gas firms benefit from low fixed costs, faster economies of scale and established technology.

The carbon tax cannot address these problems on its own, but it does help level the playing field by encouraging demand and capital to flow toward where we need it most. Comparable policies like green subsidies are also useful, but second-best; they weaken the government’s balance sheet and in certain cases can even make emissions worse.

Unfortunately, these arguments hold little sway for Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, who called for a vote of no-confidence on the dubious basis that the carbon tax is driving the cost-of-living crisis. Nor is it of much consequence to provincial leaders, who have fought the federal government hard on implementing the tax.

Not only is this attack a misleading characterization of the tax’s impact, it is also a deeply political gambit. Most expected the vote to fail. Yet by centering the next election on the carbon tax debate, Mr. Poilievre is hedging against the possibility of a new Liberal candidate, one who lacks the Trudeau baggage but still holds the line on the tax.

With the reality of inflation, a housing crisis and a general atmosphere of Trudeau-exhaustion, Mr. Poilievre has plenty of ammunition for an election campaign that does not leave our climate and our clean industries at risk. The temptation to do what is popular is ever-present in politics. Leadership is knowing when not to.

Nor are the Liberals innocent on this front. The Trudeau government deserves credit for pushing the tax through in the first place, and for structuring it as revenue-neutral. But the government’s attempt to woo Atlantic voters with the heating oil exemption has eroded its credibility and opened a vulnerable flank for Conservative attacks.

Thus, Canadian businesses are faced with the possibility of a Conservative government which has promised to eliminate the tax altogether. This kind of uncertainty is a treacherous environment for nascent companies and existing companies on the precipice of investing billions of dollars in clean tech and processes, under the expectation that demand for their fossil fuel counterparts are being kept at bay.

The tax alone is not enough; the government and opposition need to show the private sector that it can be consistent about this new policy regime long enough for these green investments to pay off. Otherwise, innovation in these much-needed technologies will remain stagnant in Canada, and markets for clean energy will be dominated by our more forward-thinking competitors.

A carbon tax is not a panacea for our climate woes, but it is central to any attempt to protect a rapidly warming planet and to develop the right businesses for that future. We can only hope that the next generation of Canadian leaders will have a little more vision.

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Economy

Business leaders say housing biggest risk to economy: KPMG survey – BNN Bloomberg

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Business leaders see the housing crisis as the biggest risk to the economy, a new survey from KPMG Canada shows.

It found 94 per cent of respondents agreed that high housing costs and a lack of supply are the top risk, and that housing should be a main focus in the upcoming federal budget. The survey questioned 534 businesses.

Housing issues are forcing businesses to boost pay to better attract talent and budget for higher labour costs, agreed 87 per cent of respondents. 

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“What we’re seeing in the survey is that the businesses are needing to pay more to enable their workers to absorb these higher costs of living,” said Caroline Charest, an economist and Montreal-based partner at KPMG.

The need to pay more not only directly affects business finances, but is also making it harder to tamp down the inflation that is keeping interest rates high, said Charest.

High housing costs and interest rates are straining households that are already struggling under high debt, she said.

“It leaves household balance sheets more vulnerable, in particular, in a period of economic slowdown. So it creates areas of vulnerability in the economy.”

Higher housing costs are themselves a big contributor to inflation, also making it harder to get the measure down to allow for lower rates ahead, she said. 

Businesses have been raising the alarm for some time. 

A report out last year from the Ontario Chamber of Commerce also emphasized how much the housing crisis is affecting how well businesses can attract talent. 

Almost 90 per cent of businesses want to see more public-private collaboration to help solve the crisis, the KPMG survey found.

“How can we work bringing all stakeholders, that being governments, not-for-profit organizations and the community and the private sector together, to find solutions to develop new models to deliver housing,” said Charest.

“That came out pretty strong from our survey of businesses.”

The federal government has been working to roll out more funding supports for other levels of government, and introduced measures like a GST rebate for rental housing construction, but it only has limited direct control on the file. 

Part of the federal funding has been to link funding to measures provinces and municipalities adopt that could help boost supply. 

The vast majority of respondents to the KPMG survey supported tax measures to make housing payments more affordable, such as making mortgage interest tax deductible, but also want to maintain the capital gains tax exemption for a primary residence.

The survey of companies was conducted in February using Sago’s Methodify online research platform. Respondents were business owners or executive-level decision makers.

About a third of the leaders are at companies with revenue over $500 million, about half have revenue between $100 million and $500 million, with the rest below. 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 27, 2024.

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