CCS project announced for ammonia facility

Ammonia producer CF Industries Holdings is moving forward with a carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) project at its Yazoo City, Miss., complex.

The facility is expected to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted to the atmosphere from the facility by up to 500,000 metric tons annually. As part of the project, the company has signed a definitive commercial agreement with ExxonMobil for the transport and sequestration in permanent geologic storage of the CO2. Sequestration is expected to start in 2028.

CF Industries will invest approximately $100 million into its Yazoo City Complex to build a CO2 dehydration and compression unit to enable up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 generated as a byproduct of the ammonia production process and subsequently captured to be transported and stored. Once sequestration by ExxonMobil has commenced, CF Industries expects the project to qualify for tax credits under Section 45Q of the Internal Revenue Code, which provides a credit per metric ton of CO2 sequestered.

A CF Industries’ facility. The producer of ammonia has signed an agreement with ExxonMobil to develop a CCS project at its Yazoo City, Miss., facility. (Image: CF Industries)

Once sequestration has begun, the Yazoo City Complex will be able to manufacture products with a substantially lower carbon intensity than conventional ammonia production sites. Most of the ammonia produced at the Yazoo City Complex is upgraded into nitrogen fertilizers such as urea ammonium nitrate (UAN) solutions and ammonium nitrate (AN), or upgraded into diesel exhaust fluid, which is used to reduce NOx emissions from diesel trucks. AN produced at Yazoo City is used as fertilizer and also by the mining industry as a component of explosives. Demand for these products manufactured with a lower carbon intensity is expected to increase significantly as the agriculture and mining industries work to lower carbon emissions in their supply chains.

The Yazoo City CCS project represents CF Industries’ second major decarbonization project leveraging CCS technologies, as well as its second CCS project with ExxonMobil. The companies are progressing a CCS project at CF Industries’ Donaldsonville, La., facility that will sequester up to 2 million tons of CO2 annually that would otherwise have been emitted to the atmosphere. Sequestration for the Donaldsonville project is expected to begin in 2025. Implementation of the Donaldsonville and Yazoo City CCS projects will allow CF Industries to achieve the Company’s 2030 emissions intensity reduction goal.