Baku, Azerbaijan, Sept. 21
By Maksim Tsurkov – Trend:
The work to build a carbamide plant of the Azerbaijan state oil company SOCAR has been completed by 96 percent, a source in Azerbaijan’s oil and gas market told Trend Sept. 21.
The engineering work and equipment procurement are completed by 100 percent, construction work – by 90 percent, civil works – by 98 percent, while the equipment installation is completed by 78 percent, according to the source.
“It is planned to start production at the plant in the third quarter of 2018.”
The plant will produce 650,000-660,000 tons of carbamide per year. It is planned to supply a quarter of production, that is, 150,000-200,000 tons of carbamide, to the Azerbaijani domestic market. The remaining part will be exported to Turkey, Georgia and the markets of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea countries.
South Korea’s Samsung Engineering won the tender for the construction of the carbamide plant. Samsung Engineering acts as a general contractor of the plant’s construction, but it has no license for production of carbamide and ammonia, which will be by-product in the carbamide production process. Therefore, the relevant licensing agreements were signed with Haldor Topsoe company (Denmark) for production of ammonia and Stamicarbon B.V. company (the Netherlands) for production of carbamide.
Production at the plant will be environmentally friendly, that is, no pollutant emissions into the atmosphere are expected.
The plant will have an autonomous electricity system. The plant will consume 25-26 MW of electricity per hour.
At first, financing of construction work was carried out from the Azerbaijani state budget and about 205 million manats were allocated from there before the beginning of 2015, but later it was decided to switch to project finance and negotiations with banks were started.
As a result, the Export–Import Bank of South Korea (EximBank) opened a line of credit worth 500 million euros under Azerbaijan’s state guarantee to complete the construction of the plant. EximBank will directly provide 251 million euros, while 249 million euros will be allocated by three commercial banks (Italy’s UniCredit S.p.A., France’s Societe Generale S.A. and Germany’s Deutsche Bank AG) with the support of EximBank.