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[00:00:08] Mike Howell:
The Dirt with me, Mike Howell, an eKonomics podKast where I present the down and dirty agronomic science to help grow crops and bottom lines. Inspired by ekonomics.com, farming’s go to informational resource. I’m here to break down the latest crop nutrition research, news, and issues, helping farmers make better business decisions through actionable insights. Let’s dig in. Well, hello again, everyone. Welcome back to The Dirt. Today we have Chris Boyda with us. Chris, welcome to The Dirt.
[00:00:45] Chris Boyda:
Thanks, Mike. Appreciate you having me.
[00:00:46] Mike Howell:
Chris, if you will, take just a couple of minutes and introduce yourself to our listeners and let them know what you do.
[00:00:51] Chris Boyda:
My name is Chris Boyda. I’m an engineer by trade. Worked my way up through many manufacturing roles, particularly at the Redwater site here at Nutrien. And now I work in the capacity as the Senior Manager of Operations for the Redwater site.
[00:01:06] Mike Howell:
What does a senior manager do? What’s your day look like?
[00:01:09] Chris Boyda:
Manufacturing, it’s a completely dynamic environment and truthfully, every day looks different. It’s hard to characterize a typical day, but in essence, safe production of our fertilizer products is the name of the game, and that presents a pretty sizable challenge day in, day out, making sure our operations are healthy, managing risk, and going through the planning efforts to make sure our equipment is well-maintained to preserve the safety of course, the people in the facility and surrounding the facility. That’s what it looks like in its essence. But truthfully, there’s a lot of meeting, there’s a lot of discussions. It’s a big and varied talented team of people, and it’s just real pleasure to work with the likes of them each and every day.
[00:01:53] Mike Howell:
Chris, you mentioned that you were at the Redwater facility. I know we have several nitrogen producing facilities around the country or around North America. Can you give us an idea how many production plants we have in North America that are producing nitrogen fertilizer?
[00:02:06] Chris Boyda:
Nutrien has eight primary nitrogen producing facilities, four in Canada and four in the United States. I’m talking to both the United States. There’s Lima, Ohio, Augusta, Georgia, Geismar, Louisiana, and Borger, Texas make up the four primary nitrogen producing sites in the US. And in Canada, the biggest, best, I’m a little partial for sure. Redwater, Fort Saskatchewan, Joffre, and Carseland all located in Alberta, Canada.
[00:02:39] Mike Howell:
Chris, we’ve talked a lot about different nitrogen products over the years. We’ve got urea, we’ve got UAN solutions with different concentration of nitrogen. We’ve got anhydrous ammonia, we’ve got ammonium sulfate, and the list can go on and on. Talk a little bit about the different products that are manufactured there at Redwater.
[00:02:55] Chris Boyda:
Redwater is one of the biggest integrated fertilizer facilities in Nutrien and certainly within Canada. And what comes with that is a wide and varied suite of products like you mentioned. It all starts with ammonia. Ammonia is the key product that all the other products are derivatives of that. Ammonia, you got your urea granulation at Redwater. Of course, we make the UAN solution, primarily 28% nitrogen and nitric acid, which is an intermediate that is used to make ammonium nitrate, which of course makes its way into UAN. In addition, some of our nitrate solution serves industrial client mining used in an explosive sort of application. And then also at Redwater, as you mentioned, sulfates, ammonium sulfate, which is another important ingredient, fertilizer product for agricultural purposes.
[00:03:54] Chris Boyda:
And the one thing that I would say is a little bit new and unique at Redwater is that recently we have a new product. We call it urea liquor solution, but this is 32.5% urea solution, which makes its way into DEF, which is used for emission reduction in diesel engines. That’s something that is new for us at the Redwater facility as of April of last year.
[00:04:21] Mike Howell:
Quite a list of products there. Chris, you mentioned it all started with the ammonia. Talk a little bit about the gassiest form of that and how it’s converted from that into these other forms of nitrogen.
[00:04:31] Chris Boyda:
Ammonia, really interesting production process. It all starts with natural gas and steam and air. If you think about it from a molecular formula, NH3. The natural gas, we combine that with steam in our primary reformer, crack the natural gas in an attempt or in a way to basically make the hydrogen. That’s an important part of the ammonia molecule. The nitrogen comes from the biggest and most plentiful source of nitrogen, the air. We take in the air, filter the air, compress it, and introduce it into our secondary reformer. And this is where we consume all the oxygen. And what is left is nitrogen. As it makes its way through the production process, you have nitrogen and hydrogen that has just undergone the steam reforming process and conversion. Once we have the nitrogen and hydrogen and the CO2, the CO2 is a byproduct of this process and we remove it and it is a feedstock to the urea process and we export it as well.
[00:05:40] Chris Boyda:
That’s the key or the highlights of the ammonia process. Very interesting process. Lots of high speed turbomachinery, compressors, turbines. And of course, it takes energy, high temperature and cold temperature applications, which introduces some interesting things from metallurgical perspective for our equipment.
[00:06:01] Mike Howell:
That’s how you make the ammonia. Talk a little bit about the next step and how you get that into urea.
[00:06:06] Chris Boyda:
Once we have the ammonia, we cool it down and store it in our storage tanks. And then from there, we pump it over to our urea process. This liquid ammonia is introduced into a high pressure reactor with the CO2 up to high pressure. And we form an intermediate product called ammonium carbamate, which undergoes a secondary reaction to dehydrate into urea and water. Once we form the urea in the reactor, it’s all about breaking down the ammonium carbamate to recycle ammonia and CO2 back to the reactor, and of course, removing the water that is produced in the reaction. Once we get to the end of the process, we’re about 98% urea, 2% water. We got to remove some of that residual water so that it’s almost pure urea. And then at Redwater, we introduce this into our four granulators where we make urea granular product. After that, we cool it down and conveyor it out to the storage building, load it for truck and rail, ready for the customers.
[00:07:19] Mike Howell:
Chris, you mentioned you’re removing the water from it. Is the urea in a liquid state at that point, and then it goes into the granulation process?
[00:07:25] Chris Boyda:
That is correct. The liquid urea melt heads over to our granulator and it is sprayed into a granulator on granules, a rotating bed of granules. And the air that comes in from the atmosphere cools and solidifies this melt onto granules to grow them to the proper product size. Actually, we grow them to various sizes. Once it leaves the granulator, we screen it. So the things that are too big or the granules that are too big, of course we break those down, send them back to the granulator. The granules that are just right are our product and the granules that are too small, they fall through the screen, and of course, back to our granulator to grow them to be product size. Perfect for the customer.
[00:08:10] Mike Howell:
Chris, another product you mentioned was the UAN solutions. Where do we get the products that go into those solutions?
[00:08:16] Chris Boyda:
It all starts with the urea melt solutions. We take slip stream from our urea melt process or urea plant. We send that over to our UAN mixing facility. There we combine with ammonium nitrate solution, cool it down and pump it out to the storage tanks just in that perfect 28% nitrogen content. Where the nitrogen or the ammonium nitrate comes from, haven’t mentioned that. That also comes from an ammonia product. First, we make the ammonia, which we send to our nitric acid process. We combine that with oxygen over a platinum converter catalyst, and we produce various NOx. Essentially, we absorb that into water to make the right concentration of nitric acid. And from there, we take the nitric acid, combine it with some more ammonia in our ammonium nitrate plant to make ammonium nitrate solution, which makes its way to the UAN mixing solution and combine that with the urea and there you have it, a UAN finished product ready for the customer as well.
[00:09:25] Mike Howell:
Chris, you’ve mentioned ammonium nitrate a couple of times. It’s my understanding that we do not sell ammonium nitrate as a fertilizer anymore. We do still produce it, but we no longer sell it strictly a standalone fertilizer product. Is that right?
[00:09:37] Chris Boyda:
Yes. At Redwater, that is absolutely true, Mike. Ammonium nitrate makes its way into the UAN, which is a finished product, but ammonium nitrate in itself is not marketed as a fertilizer product. The ammonium nitrate that leaves our facility in solution form is intended for an industrial client, like I mentioned for mining application. Yes, it is true. Certainly at our facility, ammonium nitrate is no longer marketed as a finished agricultural product.
[00:10:13] Mike Howell:
And I think the only other product that we’ve talked about today is ammonium sulfate. Do you want to talk just a minute about how we produce the ammonium sulfate?
[00:10:20] Chris Boyda:
Sure. Ammonium sulfate all starts with sulfuric acid and ammonia. We’ve talked about how the ammonia is made in its simplest terms, but on the sulfuric acid side, we import elemental sulfur from various places within the province, upstream oil and gas for the most part. That elemental sulfur arrives in truck, and we take it and pump it into our burner. We oxidize the sulfur to make sulfur dioxide, and we take that sulfur dioxide with some excess oxygen over a vanadium catalyst to produce SO3 sulfur trioxide, which we absorb into water to produce sulfuric acid.
[00:11:05] Chris Boyda:
This sulfuric acid makes its way into our ammonium sulfate granulation pipe reactor. We combine that with ammonia, and there we produce ammonium sulfate in the pipe reactor, which is a slurry solution, and we spray that onto a bed of sulfate granules in a granulator, make various sizes similar to the urea process where we have big sulfate granules, small sulfate granules, and sulfate granules that are just right product size. We separate them through a screening process, and the product makes its way into the storage building where we load it into truck and rail for our customers, primarily in the local geographic area.
[00:11:52] Mike Howell:
Chris, that kind of leads me into my next question. We’ve talked about all of these nitrogen fertilizer products. Can you elaborate a little bit more on where these products end up that you’re producing there at Redwater? How far do you end up shipping these products into the ag markets?
[00:12:06] Chris Boyda:
Talking a little bit about the finished products that we make at Redwater. The lion’s share of our products are for the agricultural customers. Those agricultural customers are not too far away from our facility, in fact. So most of our product, I would say, probably makes its way into the fairly small geographic region in and around the facility in Northern Alberta, Saskatchewan, and maybe as far as Manitoba. That’s where most of our products go. To get the products there, it’s about 50 to 60% of our total finished products leaves our facility in rail cars and is railed to the various customer and distributor locations in Western Canada, and the residual leaves by a truck. The product in trucks ends up at a much closer location to our production facility.
[00:13:00] Mike Howell:
Chris, that’s a great message. We don’t want to be shipping this stuff halfway around the world. That’s just going to make our environmental footprint even worse. We appreciate that it’s staying as local as possible. And that’s one reason we have these production facilities scattered around so that we can deliver it in market as close as possible.
[00:13:17] Chris Boyda:
Correct. That’s right. Going back to the top, that is precisely why our nitrogen production facilities are scattered in Northern Alberta or Alberta to satisfy the Western market. And of course, the facilities in the United States satisfy the Eastern markets. The production product makes its way to the farmer’s, very close area to where it is produced.
[00:13:42] Mike Howell:
Chris, one thing you mentioned early in our conversation was you spend a lot of time thinking about safety and making sure the plant runs safely. Talk a little bit about some of the safety measures that you have implemented there at the plant and how you make sure everybody goes home safe every day.
[00:13:56] Chris Boyda:
In terms of safety, what it all starts with is well-trained operation personnel, operating the equipment within its design limits at target operating positions. To enable that, we need to focus on making sure that our equipment is in good, reliable function. So that means it’s well-maintained first and foremost. And in order to do that, we have basic everyday maintenance on pumps, piping systems and such, but we’re not able to perform all of that maintenance to keep the facility in a safe, operable state while the facility is running. Every few years, we take the plants down and they have a different schedule where we perform a turnaround. And in this turnaround, this is where we do all of the core inspections to make sure that our equipment is in good condition, monitor any changes, and we perform all of our other maintenance, repairs, any sort of projects or equipment replacements to make sure that at the end of the turnaround, the facility is in a good, healthy state, ready to run reliably for the next three or four years, depending on which plant we are talking about.
[00:15:13] Mike Howell:
Well, we have covered quite a lot of topics here today. I really appreciate you taking time to visit with us. Is there anything else that you want to add before we wrap this episode up?
[00:15:21] Chris Boyda:
I appreciate the opportunity to give a little bit of an introduction to how we make fertilizer, particularly at the Redwater site, and an opportunity to introduce how we ensure that our plant processes are safe throughout the operational rhythm. Thank you again for the opportunity. Really appreciate it.
[00:15:41] Mike Howell:
So I know I sure got a lot of information out of this visit today. I’m sure our listeners did as well. Listeners, thank you for tuning in this week. And if you will, hang around for just a couple of moments. We’ll be right back with segment two. Farming isn’t farming without questions, and now there’s a place to go for answers. At eKonomics, an entire team of agronomists is waiting and ready to help for free. No question is too big or too small. Visit Nutrien-ekonomics with a K .com and submit your question with the ask an agronomist feature. Listeners, welcome back for segment two. Glad you’re back with us. Today, we’ve got Lyle Cowell back in the studio with us. Lyle, welcome back to The Dirt.
[00:16:23] Lyle Cowell:
Thanks for having me, Mike, as always.
[00:16:25] Mike Howell:
Lyle, today, we’ve got a question for you about nitrogen, and the question is, what is the risk of under applying nitrogen?
[00:16:32] Lyle Cowell:
That’s a good question, and it’s one I think that comes up with almost every farmer as they’re planning for next year. As within agronomy, the answer is always it depends. It depends on how much you are already applying. The nitrogen response curve has a steep part and a flat part. You have very rapid responses as you apply 20 or 40 or 60 or 80 pounds of N in most conditions. If the soil is deficient in nitrogen, you eventually get to a point where adding more nitrogen has declining effects on yield increase, and we get to the flat part of the curve. The curve starts to flatten out. It depends where you’re on, on that curve. In some regions and on some farms, the crop might need 120 pounds of N and the farmer may be typically applying 150. And in a case like that, you probably can reduce your N rate without any significant effect on the crop.
[00:17:32] Lyle Cowell:
Now, for farmers that are farming in a region or on a farm where they’re on the steep part of the curve, and I think that a lot of farmers are on that steep part of the curve or near the edge of the cliff as such, reducing your rate from 120 pounds of N to 100 pounds of N might have a pretty significant effect and potential yield. You have to start off with understanding how much nitrogen you really need based on a soil test, based on your experience, based on the expected amount of nitrogen that your crop will require, and then assess your risk. It can be a huge risk because once you get to that steep part of the curve, the nitrogen response curve, yield loss can become significant very quickly. You want to not just suddenly step into a year and significantly drop your N rate without understanding the past history and your risk of doing so.
[00:18:30] Mike Howell:
Lyle, that’s a great answer. And talking about the potential for yield loss, let’s dig just a little bit deeper and talk about another aspect of under applying nitrogen. Can you address the protein concentration and the effects that’s going to have on protein in the grain?
[00:18:43] Lyle Cowell:
You bet. When we think protein, probably the first crop that we think of is the impact on wheat. It affects protein, of course, in every crop, but the one that usually comes to mind is wheat. There are sometimes crop premiums for high protein wheat. Certainly, I sit here in Western Canada and the spring wheat that is grown here tends to not be super high yielding, but tends to be high in quality and high in protein. So we do tend to focus on that protein content. Now, protein responses tend to lag a little bit behind yield responses. The crop will maximize yield response, and then protein will continue to accumulate. You may actually still gain in crop quality protein concentration of the seed after the yield has been maximized. So again, that does add into the economic response question for the farmer. If this is a year that they expect to see a protein benefit, a protein premium to their crop, they need to pay a little bit more attention to the nitrogen rate that they utilize.
[00:19:50] Mike Howell:
Lyle, we really appreciate you joining us today. Listeners, we appreciate you tuning in. And as always, if you need more information on anything we’ve talked about today, you can visit our website, that’s nutrien-ekonomics with a K .com. Until next time, this has been Mike Howell with The Dirt. Hey guys, if you like what you heard today, do us a favor and share this podcast with someone else. It could be your neighbor, your friend, your crop advisor, or whoever you think would enjoy it. Your support helps ensure future episodes. So please like, subscribe, share, and rate the show wherever you’re listening from.
