Officials with a fertilizer company planning to build a $1.2 billion plant in Killona recently visited with parish leaders and said they are on track to finalize the deal within a year.
AM Agrigen Industries has announced the plans for the 650-acre site where the plant would be built and have since been working toward obtaining permits that would allow them to manufacture nitrogen rich urea fertilizer out of natural gas for agriculture use.
Mark Vandervoorde, chief executive officer of AM Agrigen, said while the deal is not finalized yet, they have applied for all permits necessary to build the plant and are awaiting responses from regulatory agencies. The company has already invested a lot of time and money into the process and is not looking at any other potential building sites.
“From our perspective, there is a commitment that this plant will get built. We still have a number of hurdles to get past before everyone else agrees on it, but we are committed to this process. If we can get through it, we will build the plant,” he said.
Vandervoorde said that St. Charles Parish presents the perfect location for a fertilizer plant.
“Right now there is 12 to 15 million tons of urea demand in the United States. There is about six million tons produced, so there is about seven million tons per year currently imported and a lot of it comes in through the Port of New Orleans and then it gets put onto barges and then shipped up into the Midwest,” he said.
While the United States currently imports more than half of the urea the country uses in a year, Vandervoorde wants AM Agrigen to be able to export to other countries as well, which is another reason why St. Charles Parish is a good location for them.
“We are coming into building this because this is part of a long-term strategy of growth for the company,” he said.
While AM Agrigen will be in a good position to ship urea to the Midwest, where much of it is currently used, they will also be able to easily ship internationally.
“Over the next 10 years we expect the amount of urea manufactured in the US to be equal to the amount of the US’ demand. In fact it may even shift to where urea is exported and our plant being located on the lower Mississippi River, we intend to have a dock with very good cargo loading capability,” Vandervoorde said. “We expect that if the market becomes an export market rather than an import market, we’ll be in a good position to take advantage of that.”
Should the plant be built, it is estimated to create 150 permanent jobs with a $55,000 average salary. It’s believed that 1,025 indirect jobs would be created as well.
But Vandervoorde was quick to say that the plant was not just about jobs.
“We will make sure we take an active role in the community and that we will contribute not only from a jobs perspective, but in other ways we can improve the quality of life in St. Charles Parish,” he said.
Corey Faucheux, director of Economic Development and Tourism for St. Charles Parish, said one of the big reasons the parish is interested in bringing in Am Agrigen is that nothing like it exists in St. Charles Parish right now.
“Their product is not like anything else we have here. It is a natural product that they are going to ship out and export and ship upriver and upstream of here. It is just the safety of the product itself,” he said.
In contrast to some of the volatile chemicals handled at local chemical plants and refineries, Vandervoorde said the urea product is very safe.
“Essentially it is just nitrogen…you can’t burn it, you can’t explode it. You can’t jump up and down on it and make it do anything. It is just about as safe as you can imagine a product will be. There is really nothing you could do to it to make it hurt anybody,” he said.
However, Faucheux said there will still be public outreach with area residents before the company finalizes their plans to build the plant.
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