Ammonia Technology Roadmap	Chapter 1. Ammonia production today
Towards more sustainable nitrogen fertiliser production

considered, moving towards a more sustainable agricultural system will require effort on many fronts and finding a balance between the benefits and impacts of different agricultural production methods. In all likelihood, agricultural production with mineral fertilisers and with organic methods will both play a role in a sustainable future, and maximising efficiency across agricultural value chains will help minimise the various aforementioned environmental impacts.

What will happen tomorrow to today’s CO2 emissions from ammonia production?

The ammonia industry’s infrastructure is like a container ship – it has inertia and is slow to change direction. While producers are constantly responding to price fluctuations and changes to their order books, short of major disruption to the economy, the behaviour of the system tends to maintain fairly stable trends. Understanding the main pieces of equipment that comprise the emissionsintensive components of the industry’s infrastructure is critical to assessing the underlying momentum in the system. Existing infrastructure certainly presents challenges for reducing emissions, but there are also technology opportunities to be seized.

The amount and type of energy that the industry uses at any given time are the consequence of past investments in ammonia production facilities. It is not possible to predict accurately the future energy consumption and subsequent emissions of these installations, as there is scope for adjusting both the quantities and types of energy carriers that they will use and the length of the period they will actually remain in operation. In the end, decisions about whether to cease, continue or extend the operation of a given facility will be based predominantly on its operational cost relative to existing or emerging alternatives, and/or the ability to obtain a sufficient return in a given economic and regulatory context. However, examining potential trajectories of various emission streams, under a stated set of assumptions, is a useful starting point to examine the challenge posed by existing assets and our room to manoeuvre in the coming decades.

The current age profile and typical lifespan of the world’s ammonia plants can provide a guide as to the rate at which the existing stock of equipment in the ammonia industry will be decommissioned. Without any further investment in new capacity, emissions from ammonia production would decline, but not as fast as one might think. If operated under the conditions typically observed in recent years (similar energy intensities, capacity factors and fuel mixes), existing ammonia capacity could lead to between 4.4 Gt and 15.5 Gt of CO2 emissions, considering a typical plant lifetime range of 20-50 years. This is equivalent to 10-35 years’

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Ammonia Technology Roadmap	Chapter 1. Ammonia production today
Towards more sustainable nitrogen fertiliser production

worth of emissions from ammonia production in 2020, and excludes any emissions from the new capacity needed to replace existing facilities and meet rising demand in the future.

Mt CO

Projected emissions from existing ammonia plants under different lifetime assumptions

500

400

300	+ 3.6 Gt CO2
200			+ 3.7 Gt CO2
100	~ 4.4 Gt CO2			+ 3.7 Gt CO2
0	2030	2040	2050	2060	2070
2020
	20-year lifetime assumption			30-year lifetime assumption
	40-year lifetime assumption			50-year lifetime assumption

IEA, 2021.

Emissions from existing ammonia production facilities could amount to 4.4-15.5 Gt CO2, equivalent to 10-35 years’ worth of emissions based on ammonia production in 2020.

A key factor in estimating the future emissions from existing ammonia facilities is their current age. A plant built in one year is highly unlikely to be decommissioned the next, but equally no facility is designed to operate indefinitely, so the starting point is of critical importance in estimating the period over which these assets might continue to operate. Using data provided by the International Fertilizer Association,15 the global average age of ammonia plants in 2020 is estimated to be around 24 years. Figure 1.10 shows the average age and output of global facilities by country. The oldest plants in the world still operating today were installed just under a century ago, although these are clearly outliers when viewing the national average age data available with this study.

China accounts for 30% of ammonia production capacity globally, and these assets are both young (around 12 years old on average) and emissions-intensive

15 Plant-level data held by the International Fertilizer Association are confidential. National averages were calculated and provided for use in this study.

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Ammonia Technology Roadmap	Chapter 1. Ammonia production today
Towards more sustainable nitrogen fertiliser production

(85% are coal gasification units). The age of individual plants within the country will vary considerably, but China’s growth in output over the past 20 years (more than 60%) shows the relatively short timeframe over which most of these installations have been added. Industrial facilities in China also tend to be replaced more frequently than in other regions of the world, often owing to mandates targeting the replacement of inefficient capacity. Typical asset lifetimes in the power and heavy industry sectors tend to be in the range of 25-35 years, compared with 30-50 years globally. The average age of the world’s ammonia plants excluding China was around 29 years in 2020.

On the right-hand side of the large share of Chinese capacity is significant variation in average age across the other regions. At one end are the recently installed plants in Africa (less than 18 years on average) and capacity in Europe at the other (around 40 years on average). Plants in the Middle East tend to be at the lower end of the age profile, at 19 years old on average, and plants in the Americas towards the upper end (35 years).

Geographic distribution and average age of ammonia production facilities in 2020

Years	60
								Germany
	50
							United
						Russia
	40				India		States
	30		Saudi Arabia
		China
	20
	10
	0
	0	40	80	120		160	200	240

Mt capacity

North America

Central and South America

Europe

Africa

Middle East

Eurasia

Asia Pacific

IEA, 2021.

Source: National average age data provided by the IFA.

Around 30% of the existing stock of ammonia production capacity is based in China, with an average age of 12 years, compared with a global average age of around 24 years.

The average age since installation only tells part of the story, however. Like Theseus’ ship, the extent to which many of the older plants have been refurbished and upgraded may render them unrecognisable relative to their original installation arrangement. Many of their parts will have been refurbished and replaced as they

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Ammonia Technology Roadmap	Chapter 1. Ammonia production today
Towards more sustainable nitrogen fertiliser production

wear, and in order to maintain competitiveness and meet evolving regulatory standards, owners are likely to have upgraded them over time to improve energy performance and reduce pollution. A detailed maintenance and upgrade record for every plant in the world was not available for this study, explaining the range of prospective lifetimes (20-50 years) we have used in estimating the potential emissions from the existing stock of plants.

To the extent that much of the existing capital stock will still be in operation decades into the future, the associated CO2 emissions are often considered to be “locked in”. However, these emissions are by no means destined to take place, and there are several strategies and technologies that can be deployed to varying extents to help “unlock” emissions from existing infrastructure:

Early retirement or interim underutilisation of assets, either because of a change in market conditions that makes them uneconomic, or because of laws and regulations that force early closure or partial operation.

Refurbishment and retrofitting, such as enhanced process integration to boost

energy efficiency, or the application of emission reduction technologies such as replacing a portion of the natural gas inputs with electrolytic hydrogen or applying CCS.

Fuel switching and incremental blending, sometimes combined with a degree of retrofitting, to allow assets to use less carbon-intensive fuels or recovered fuels.

In the regions where industrial capacity is generally older, earlier retirement than might otherwise be desirable without efforts to reduce emissions will be less painful economically, as the plants would already have provided a substantial return on their original investment. In the countries with younger assets, greater emphasis is likely to be placed on retrofitting with more energy-efficient and less carbon-intensive technologies, where it is economic to do so.

Beyond applying the mitigation strategies above, existing production facilities can be used to bridge the gap to deployment of innovative near-zero-emission technology. This is especially important for the sustainable transition of the assets used to produce ammonia, where readily available alternatives for dramatic reductions in emission intensity are not yet widely accessible to the market. Strategically timed investments to partially renew existing infrastructure – or a decision to forgo investment – can form an important strategy to avoid investment in new capacity occurring just at the wrong time.

The estimates of emissions from existing assets associated with the 20-50-year lifetime range explored above can be used to illustrate the potential impact of

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Ammonia Technology Roadmap	Chapter 1. Ammonia production today
Towards more sustainable nitrogen fertiliser production

misalignment between the phase-out of existing facilities and the availability of near-zero-emission technologies to replace them. The 30-year difference in the lifetime range could be considered equivalent to a full cycle of new or renewed investments in emissions-intensive production capacity, leading to around 10 Gt CO2, or more than 20 years’ worth of emissions from ammonia production in 2020.

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