The plant was originally outsourced to GE in to reduce costs, increase reliability and focus on Yara’s main businesses.
The company plans to spend US$18 million to upgrade the facility, which supplies ammonia and urea liquids fertilizers to agricultural markets. While production of these products requires copious amounts of clean water, the plant must rely on brackish, low-quality surface water sources.
With the recent contract expansion, GE will continue to build, own and operate the water treatment plant with onsite GE personnel through 2020. The facility currently produces up to 320 m3/hr of demineralized water using brackish water reverse osmosis filtration (BWRO) and electrodeionization (EDI).
“The arrangement we have with GE enables us to capitalize on more favourable market conditions, which can be fleeting. We are confident we can meet the strong demands for fertilizers at acceptable margins because we can find alternative sources of water, and it also gives us substantial cost savings,” said Frank De Vogelaere, plant manager, Yara’s Ferrara, Italy, plant. “We don’t have to buy expensive demineralized water from an outside supplier, and we have avoided production losses caused by low-quality water. Our expanding activities with GE are a direct result of GE’s performance over the years, and thus we have evolved out of a traditional supplier-vendor relationship into a more effective collaboration.”
GE’s relationship with Yara SpA started with of a 2002 supply agreement for water treatment chemicals and related systems, which is ongoing. Since 2007, Yara has outsourced to GE the filtration of condensed water from boiler steam to prevent deposition and corrosions which can damage equipment and lead to energy inefficiencies.
For both the recent Yara upgrade and for the condensate polishing plant, GE is supplying all water treatment equipment, plus engineering and design, pipe work, electrical installation and all other site-related requirements, as well as spare parts and field service representatives.
