ICL Performance Products manufactures phosphate fertilizer products in Lawrence, Kansas, using raw materials from other suppliers. The plant is a former FMC phosphate products plant, now operated by the Israeli company ICL.

The Uncle Sam facility was originally owned by Freeport Chemical Co., and then by IMC Global, when that company was merged with Cargill’s crop nutrition division to form Mosaic in 2004. Like other phosphate fertilizer production sites, the Uncle Sam plant has a phosphogypsum stack, more than a square mile in size, behind the plant.

The Mosaic Company’s Faustina Plant in Louisiana is one of the largest ammonia plants in the country. It produces ammonia for ammonium phosphate fertilizers (the P of NPK), and is fed by a stream of phosphoric acid which comes to it, via pipeline, from another Mosaic plant across the river. Mosaic’s Faustina Plant is next to CF’s Nitrogen Donaldsonville Complex, the largest production site for nitrogen in the USA.

A few companies dominate the nitrogen fertilizer production industry in the USA, but none more than CF Industries. Though the company has several plants around the country, CF’s Nitrogen Production Complex in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, is by far the largest nitrogen plant in the USA.

When Nutrien came into existence in 2018, taking over the assets of PotashCorp, Nutrien acquired this combined phosphate and nitrogen fertilizer complex in Geismar, Louisiana. It is located in a chemical complex on the Mississippi River, sharing the site with an Innophos phosphate chemical plant, Honeywell Specialty Materials, and Nova Chemicals, with a phosphorous gypstack at the back of the complex.

Scattered around the country are a number of former phosphate plants in limbo, or orphaned in decay, like the Mississippi Phosphates company site in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Diammonium phosphate fertilizer was produced here from the 1950s to 2014, when the company went bankrupt. A $12 million fund that had been set aside to address the remediation quickly ran out. Two phosphogypsum stacks ceased to be managed, and millions of gallons of acidic liquid wastes flowed into the bay.

ICL Performance Products operates this plant at Carondelet, Missouri, which was formerly operated by Monsanto. ICL makes fertilizers, food products, and engineered materials, based from its origins as an Israeli company extracting minerals from the Dead Sea.

Nutrien, the nation’s second largest phosphate fertilizer producer, operates several facilities that further refine and blend products, including this upgrading plant in Joplin, Missouri.

Nutrien, the nation’s second largest phosphate fertilizer producer, operates several facilities that further refine and blend products, including the Weeping Water Phosphate plant in Nebraska.

Located a few miles up the road from Mosaic’s massive phosphate mine and plant is Intrepid’s West Mine facility. Intrepid, based in Denver, is the only US company dedicated solely to producing potash in the USA, and produces more than anyone else, from two mines in New Mexico and two in Utah. The West Mine, opened in 1931 by the American Potash Company, was the first potash mine in the region.

Nutrien is the new owner of PotashCorp’s phosphate mine and plant in Aurora, North Carolina. Not as vast as the company’s northern Florida site, the operation here, measuring 6 miles by 6 miles, is large enough to be called the largest integrated phosphate mining and chemical plant in the nation, since it has just one plant, surrounded by its mines and waste ponds and piles.

PCI Nitrogen operates a plant in Pasadena, Texas, the heart of the densest petrochemical production center in the country. Though focused on nitrogen now, this was a former phosphate facility, built in WWII, and operated by the explosives company Olin for many years, followed by Mobil, Agrifos, Rentech, and now PCI. Nitrogen and phosphate production (the N and P of NPK, the three basic elements of industrial agriculture) are chemically closely related, and sometimes share facilities.

The phosphate ore mined here, north of Vernal, Utah, goes to the JR Simplot Rock Springs Wyoming Plant via a pressurized slurry pipeline 96 miles long. The mine was originally developed by the San Francisco Chemical Company in 1960. It was purchased by Chevron in 1981, which built the slurry pipeline and the Rock Springs plant around 1985. 

JR Simplot operates this facility outside of Rock Springs, Wyoming, where the company makes monoammonium phosphate fertilizer, as well as phosphoric acid. The Rock Springs plant was built by Chevron in the mid-1980s, and was taken over by Simplot in 2003. The company recently built a $300 million ammonia plant at the site, which supplies the company’s largest phosphate facility, the Don Plant in Pocatello, with ammonia too.