SCHOLARSHIPS & AWARDS
summit award® recipients
the project
achievement award
The Agrium ESN-150 Project
This award is presented to a project demonstrating engineering, geological or geophysical skills and representing a substantial contribution to technical progress and the betterment of society. The Association will give credit to those firms and/or persons assuming key roles in bringing the project to completion.
Controlled Release Fertilizers (CRFs) offer significant benefits to the environment by controlling the delivery of nutrients to the growing crop and thus reducing fertilizer losses to the environment. CRFs have been in limited use for over 20 years but, until now, high production costs have prevented the technology from achieving widespread commercial adoption in the commodity agriculture market. That market represents about 95 per cent of fertilizer sales. To accomplish broad adoption of the technology, CRFs must be available at a price that is economically feasible for farmers.
Recognizing that the greatest environmental benefits will only be realized when the product is available to those farming the greatest number of acres, Agrium and its predecessor companies have been working on the development of Environmentally Smart Nitrogen (ESN), a CRF intended for broadacre agriculture commodity crops.
Results from early small-scale field tests were encouraging, and in December 1998 Agrium commissioned a semi-works scale unit at Carseland. The plant was an ambitious scale-up (70 times greater) of a smaller pilot unit at the Carseland facility. Initial process design was conducted with the assistance of Optima Engineering and Construction Inc. in Calgary. Agrium managed the construction and start-up of the semi-works unit. Not only did the semi-works unit produce sufficient quantities of product to meet larger scale field trials, it also demonstrated that costs could be reduced to a level that grain growers could afford.
Based on the success of the semi-works plant, the process was scaled up a second time. Agrium and Jacobs Engineering Group, the selected engineering, procurement and construction company, prepared a complete process design. Full approval for this $50 million project was granted in March 2005. Despite the challenges posed by the extremely high level of construction activity in Alberta, this fast-track project was completed in January 2006, only 10 months after ground was broken and with a very modest cost overrun of 10 per cent. In February 2006, the project reached a major milestone. After more than 15 years of process development and field trials, the world’s first commercial scale (150,000 tonnes/year) production unit for CRFs targeted at commodity agriculture was started up at Carseland.