CF Industries Donaldsonville Nitrogen Production Complex, Louisiana

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. The plant is located on the Mississippi River, in the nation’s principal petrochemical production area, a hundred mile long stretch of river lined with industrial facilities between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Gas lines feed the plant, and nitrogen products, in fluid and solid forms, are shipped out by railcars, trucks, and ships. The plant is connected to the Gulf Central Pipeline, an ammonia pipeline built in the late 1960s, that connects plants and terminals in agricultural areas as far away from here as Nebraska and Indiana. CF, which stands for Central Farmers, was established in 1946, as a distribution network for a federation of agricultural cooperatives, when the postwar synthetic fertilizer industry expanded. In the 1950s, CF began to produce fertilizer components too. By the late 1960s, CF was on its way to being one of the largest distributors and producers of nitrogen, phosphate, and potash products in the USA. In 2005, it ceased to be a cooperative, and became a publicly traded corporation. Since then it has sold its potash and phosphate operations, focusing on nitrogen production. CF began nitrogen production at the big plant in Donaldsonville in 1966, expanding it in the 1990s, and again in 2016, when more than $2 billion was spent on increasing its capacity. It now covers 1,400 acres and produces 5 million tons of nitrogen products for agricultural and industrial use. The plant produces Ammonia and UAN (urea-ammonium nitrate), the most common forms of nitrogen fertilizer feedstocks, as well as granular urea, a solid form of fixed nitrogen.