Leigh Creek Energy is exploring optionality to produce domestic AdBlue to address chronic supply shortages across Australia.
Recent curbs on fertiliser exports from China and the announced closure of Australia’s only urea manufacturing facility has created a growing shortage and increase in the price of urea both worldwide and in Australia.
Urea is a key chemical used in the manufacturing process in several industries including fertiliser, chemical production, AdBlue fuel additives, resin production and the medical sector.
Leigh Creek Energy said the growing supply shortage of urea in Australia highlights the strategic importance of the Leigh Creek Urea Project (LCUP) for domestic and international markets.
“Due to its fully integrated nature, the carbon neutral LCUP is in a unique position to create diverse urea-based products onsite, which can include AdBlue,” said Leigh Creek Energy managing director Phil Staveley.
“The current AdBlue crisis has only further highlighted the importance of domestic urea production and the ability of the LCUP to play a major role in addressing supply chain and foreign exchange and global commodity price issues that several local industries currently face.”
The LCUP will be the only fully integrated urea production facility in Australia, with all inputs for carbon neutral urea production on-site.
The LCUP can direct its carbon neutral urea production into a range of end uses, to address urea shortages, and create a multi-channel revenue mix.
It’s set to become Australia’s largest urea project delivering an initial one million tonnes per annum of urea production on a carbon neutral basis.
AdBlue is the marketing term of a chemical additive referring to the fluid used in the catalytic converter fitted to exhaust systems of heavy diesel transport engines in heavy vehicles such as trucks and buses.
It is now also increasingly used in late model diesel cars and SUVs and in some countries, is mandatory.
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