Pledging a new, quick-dispersing, "super-fine" sulphur fertilizer for the ag market, a Calgary company plans a new plant in Alberta to get its sulphur from the energy sector.
Sulvaris Inc. announced Monday it has "definitive agreements" in hand to build and operate a fertilizer production plant near Rocky Mountain House, 80 km west of Red Deer.
The privately-held company said in a release it will build its plant "on the site of a large gas processing facility," but would not yet provide details Tuesday on the plant site, name the fuel processor or disclose the cost for its project.
The company described its 0-0-0-90S fertilizer product, Vitasul, as an "important link" between the volumes of excess sulphur generated by the oil and gas sector and "continually growing demand" for efficient sources of plant nutrient-grade sulphur.
The Rocky Mountain House plant, to be built this year for production to begin in 2014, would have capacity to produce up to 217,000 tonnes of sulphur fertilizer per year, the company said.
Sulvaris president Bill Boycott, a former president of Agrium Advanced Technologies, described Vitasul as "an innovative, high-analysis sulphur fertilizer product unlike anything currently available on the market."
Sulvaris said its production process would create "extremely fine" 10-micron sulphur particles that are pelletized into granules. The granules, at 2.8 to 3.1 millimetres in size, would upon wetting "quickly disperse back into super-fine sulphur particles in the soil."
Soil microbial activity would then convert the elemental sulphur to sulphate-form plant food in a form "consistently" available to crops throughout the growing season.
The company, on its website, says soil microorganisms would need "months or years" to convert much-larger particles of sulphur from competing products into crop-available sulphate.
Sulvaris was founded last year merging three heritage companies, Sulphur Solutions, Carbon Solutions and Sour Gas Solutions, formed in 2005, 2006 and 2010 respectively.
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