“The company will increase exports to the Latin American country this year,” Amir Amraei said in a meeting with a Brazilian delegation that has traveled to Iran.
The delegation, headed by Brazil’s Minister of Agriculture, Livestock and Food Supply Tereza Cristina, included Brazilian businessmen and Brazil’s Ambassador in Tehran Aguiar Neto, the Oil Ministry’s news agency Shana reported.
“In addition to producing urea fertilizer, the company has the ability to produce and export urea ammonium nitrate as a product with better quality and performance than urea fertilizer,” Amraei said.
Produced by combining urea, nitric acid and ammonia, UAN is a liquid fertilizer product with a nitrogen content ranging from 28% to 32%. UAN can be applied more uniformly than non-liquid forms of fertilizer.
Making a visit to Shiraz Petrochemical Company, the first fertilizer production facility of Iran, Cristina expressed satisfaction with the interactions between the two countries and hoped that the two nations can increase their economic cooperation.
Brazil is a major food exporter to Iran and also a major fertilizer importer - mainly urea – from Iran.
In 2020, Brazil exported to Iran $1.9 billion in agricultural products such as corn (64.4%) and soybeans (21.2%). On the other hand, sales of Iranian agricultural products to Brazil totaled $2 million in 2020, mostly walnuts, chestnuts, raisins and other dried fruits.
Brazil imports currently over 80% of the fertilizers used in agribusiness in the country.
Shiraz Petrochemical Company generated an operating income of $200 million in the first half of the current Iranian year (March 21-Sept. 22, 2021), which was 106% more than the amount made by the company in the same period of last year. The company earned a net profit of $80 million during the period.
The plant produced close to 1.76 million tons of petrochemical products, including 840,000 tons of urea in the six-month period. A part of its products were sold in the local market and the rest were exported to international markets.
Considering the completion of repair and maintenance of some units, the company plans to produce 1.4 million tons of various products in the second half of the year.
Shiraz Petrochemical Company was founded in 1959. The major feedstock for the operating plants are natural gas, limestone and salt. The natural gas source is from the main cross-country pipeline, while the limestone and salt are extracted from the adjacent mines.
The initial goal of the company was to meet the fertilizer needs for the country, but it now produces a vast variety of chemicals and petrochemicals. It has a nominal production capacity of about 3.2 million tons per year and is now one of the major urea producers in the country.
Urea is mainly used as fertilizer in the agriculture sector and as raw materials in other industries. The annual production of urea is about 5 million tons in Iran, around half of which is sold domestically and the surplus is exported. Urea production is projected to rise through the launch of several production units that are currently under construction.