By: Mike Hamilton, vice president, plant nutrients, AdvanSix
There is a limited amount of land in the world. And it is incredibly important we give farmers tools to be able to produce as much food as possible on the land they manage.
At AdvanSix, our chemistries enable customers from all over the world to deliver their products that touch people’s everyday lives. Our ammonium sulfate is a perfect example.
We take the common elements sulfur and nitrogen and transform them into an essential product that helps farmers feed the world. That’s good chemistry.
Ammonium sulfate is the preferred product for the incorporation of sulfur nutrients into dry bulk blends — the largest application method in North America. AdvanSix ammonium sulfate, Sulf-N, is a 100% made-in-America, high-analysis fertilizer that efficiently provides the nutrients crops crave and improves herbicide effectiveness.
We go to a lot of effort to understand ammonium sulfate and how we produce it. That effort has paid off in the innovations we’ve developed from what we’ve learned through our research and development. We’ve had pretty significant growth in the production of our granular ammonium sulfate. That has been a direct result of what we’ve learned in our R&D programs.
One example of innovation is the company’s recent investment to expand our granular ammonium sulfate production by approximately 200,000 tons per year.
The SUSTAIN (Sustainable U.S. Sulfate to Accelerate Increased Nutrition) program will increase the domestic availability of fertilizer and nutrient alternatives for U.S. farmers while reducing the impacts of climate change.
Historically speaking, agriculture has been a difficult industry to decarbonize. It was important to AdvanSix to incorporate sustainability into this project, not just in its name, but in our results. SUSTAIN is designed to reduce total water usage at the production facility by 10% and substantially increase target granular-grade production while targeting no net increase in energy consumption or emissions. Additionally, it’s designed to reduce nutrient discharges — aligning with AdvanSix’s drive to go beyond compliance to reduce operational impacts on the environment to address climate change, reduce air emissions, manage waste and protect water resources.
Prioritizing the commitment to the communities in which we work and operate, the SUSTAIN program will be implemented at existing AdvanSix AMS production facilities.
To learn more, visit: https://www.advansix.com/industries/plant-nutrients/.