Ammonia will flow past Odessa – Newspaper Kommersant No. 37 (7482) dated 03.03.

The government has approved a road map for the construction of Russia’s first terminal for transshipment of ammonia and nitrogen fertilizers in Taman. The new complex, which is scheduled to be launched by early 2024, will replace the export route through Odessa that was stopped a year ago. During 2023, according to the plan, local authorities and Russian Railways will have to resolve long-standing issues with Togliattiazot regarding land plots and infrastructure expansion. But experts fear that the timing of the launch of the first stage of the terminal for 2 million tons may be shifted.

Togliattiazot (TOAZ, part of the Uralchem ​​group) at the end of 2023 will launch the first stage of the offshore ammonia transshipment complex in Taman with a capacity of 2 million tons per year. Such indicators are contained in the “road map”, approved on February 22 by government decree. The second stage involves an increase in the complex’s capacity by December 2025 to 3.5 million tons of ammonia and 1.5 million tons of urea per year. The complex will be the first facility of its kind in Russia, previously ammonia was transshipped in foreign ports (mainly in Ukraine).

To implement the project, Kommersant sources say, a road map has already been signed with Russian Railways. TOAZ estimates its investments in the project at 40 billion rubles.

According to Kommersant sources familiar with the documentation, 25 billion rubles. will go to the construction of facilities for receiving goods in the port of Taman, and another 15 billion rubles – to prepare the infrastructure for sending goods from Togliatti. TOAZ’s capacity for ammonia is 3 million tons per year, for urea – 1 million tons.

Complex in the Krasnodar Territory should replace stopped on February 24, 2022, the export route through the Togliatti-Odessa ammonia pipeline, through which about 2.5 million tons of ammonia were pumped per year. TOAZ has been trying to create an alternative to the Ukrainian direction for about 20 years, but the active construction of the complex began only at the end of 2022 – after the transfer of Togliattiazot to the ownership of Uralchem. In 2015, another freeze was associated with unsettled land lease issues with the Krasnodar Territory and litigation on the recognition of ownership of real estate that the company managed to build on it. In 2019, the court ordered TOAZ to demolish buildings and unfinished facilities. But in 2022, the Arbitration Court of the Krasnodar Territory declared illegal the refusal of the regional authorities to transfer land plots in the port of Taman, where the TOAZ terminal is being built, to federal ownership (objects related to the transshipment of explosive substances can only be built on federal lands).

Now, according to the road map, from February the Togliattiazot project should be included in the list of priority infrastructure facilities, and issues between the regional administration and TOAZ regarding land plots in the port of Taman should be settled in March 2023. Until May, Rosmorrechflot will need to make changes to the documentation on the planning of the territories of the transshipment complex in the port of Taman from 2018, and local authorities will need to make changes to the general plans of the Temryuk district to accommodate the complex.

The relevance of the project has increased significantly after the stoppage of the ammonia pipeline to Odessa, states Artem Lebedskoy-Tambiev from Vygon Consulting. “In addition, although Russia is the largest exporter of ammonia (more than 4.4 million tons in 2021), at the moment there are no transshipment capacities in the country,” the expert recalls. According to him, against the backdrop of rising world gas prices, which make up the main cost of production, ammonia quotes in 2021–2022 were at a very high level, and some foreign producers were forced to reduce output.

The terminal in Taman has no alternative, adds Mikhail Burmistrov, head of InfoLine, because there is no need to talk about the restoration of pumping through the Togliatti-Odesa pipeline in the current realities. The expert doubts the deadlines for the construction of the terminal and railway network facilities laid down in the “road map”, it seems to him that the launch of the complex no earlier than the second quarter of 2024 is more realistic. But, he notes, taking into account the highest possible motivation to complete construction at TOAZ and the relatively small capacities of the first stage of the terminal from the point of view of Russian Railways, the issue of infrastructure bottlenecks seems to be solved.

Olga Mordyushenko