moranbah ammonium nitrate plant

Incitec approves ammonim nitrate plant


The central Queensland town of Moranbah will soon be home to one of the world's largest industrial grade ammonium nitrate plants.

Incitec Pivot this week announced it'll spend $935 million on the project.

It'd been abandoned by Dyno Nobel in 2007 because of cost blowouts, but now that Incitec has taken over Dyno Nobel, it's had another lease of life.

Incitec's major projects president Alan Grace says plant should be supplying farmers and coal mines by 2011.

Ammonium nitrate is used by both the mining sector as an explosive and by farmers as a fertiliser.

The project is for the manufacture of 330,000 tonnes per annum of ammonium nitrate. That product will supplied to two markets essentially, says Mr Grace

Primarily to support the coal mining industry in Central Queensland and in addition we will be supplying out of the plant some fertiliser products and a product called urea ammonium nitrate.

We will achieve what we call mechanical completion of this facility in the 1st quarter in 2010. Then we'll be ready to introduce into the process the utilities. Steam, power, water, and progressing with the chemicals.

We will then be ramping up production and proving the capability of the asset and we've said we will be in a position to have the plant running smoothly at its total capacity by the 1st quarter in 2011.

It'll take 600 people to build the project and once complete the permanent workforce will average around 100 people.

Incitec Pivot is building accommodation to house its workforce within Moranbah, thus avoiding adding to the housing shortage affecting the Central Highlands.

In this report: Alan Grace, the president of Major Projects, Incitec Pivot.