Fertilizer Markets and Finance

It’s a challenge of historic proportions.

Given the way in which our world’s population is soaring, “over the next 40 years, we need to grow crop output by the same order as over the last 10,000 years,” Darrell Zwarych, vice-president of finance, potash, for The Mosaic Company, told a Saskatchewan Mining Week gathering Friday morning in Regina.

The fertilizer giant plans to rise to the challenge.

As Zwarych told a joint meeting of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Saskatchewan and the Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce, Mosaic has a $6-billion program of expansion for its Saskatchewan facilities that mine the fertilizer potash.

Mosaic, formed from the 2004 merger of Cargill’s crop nutrients arm and IMC Global, is already the world’s largest combined producer of potash and phosphates in the world; in potash alone, it is the thirdlargest producer in the world with 12 per cent of the world’s production and annual production capacity of 10.3 million tonnes.

But more is needed.

And that’s why Mosaic - which has Saskatchewan mines at Belle Plaine, Colonsay and Esterhazy - has embarked on a long-term expansion program that will take its annual production capacity here up to 16.5 million tonnes of potash by 2021, said Zwarych, who added the 16 distinct projects within this plan are on schedule and on budget.

Read more at Leader Post