Rotem Amfert Negev

Acid Plant Database June 1, 2023

Owner	Rotem Amfert Negev Ltd.
Location	Mishor Rotem Israel
Background	1952 - Establishment of Dead Sea Works Ltd. (DSW), as a state-owned company to extract potash and other minerals from the Dead Sea. 1952 - Establishment of Negev Phosphates Ltd. as a state-owned company to exploit the phosphates reserves in the Negev Desert. 1977 - Establishment of Rotem Fertilizers Ltd. to manufacture intermediates based on phosphate rock. 1982 - Acquisition of a fertilizer plant in Amsterdam, Holland (Amfert B.V.) 1989 - Merger of Rotem and Amfert B.V. 1991 - The companies involved in the extraction and manufacture of phosphates were merged to create Rotem Amfert Negev Ltd. 1992 - Israeli Chemicals Ltd. (ICL) www.iclfertilizers.com the parent company which holds one hundred percent of Rotem's shares, was partially privatized. The percentages of ICL's shares privatized were twenty percent and five percent respectively. The Government of Israel sold less than 0.5 percent of its shares in ICL. Additional shares of ICL were sold in 1995. 2000 - Rotem Amfert Negev acquired a feed phosphate production unit in Turkey and started operating under the name of Rotem Turkey. 2001 - Marketing Activities of DSW & Rotem Amfert Negev are unified to form ICL Fertilizers Part of the ICL Group www.icl-group.com
Website	-
Plant	Plant No. 1	Plant No. 2
Coordinates*	31º 3' 50" N, 35º 11' 49" E	31º 3' 51" N, 35º 11' 46" E
Type of Plant	Sulphur Burning	Sulphur Burning
Gas Source	Elemental Sulphur	Elemental Sulphur
Plant Capacity	2400 MTPD	4100 MTPD
SA/DA	-	-
Status	Operating	Operating
Year Built	-	-
Technology	MECS	MECS
Contractor	-	-
Remarks	-	-
Pictures	Replacement SX Tower
Video	YouTube: Roten Amfert Negev, Circle of Existence
General	The Negev Phosphates Chemicals Company at Mishor Rotem, located immediately adjacent to the Dimona reactor, is Israel's only acknowledged nuclear fuel cycle facility. The Negev is the largest, but the least populated, region of Israel. Resources found in the Negev include copper, iron, manganese, phosphates and uranium. Negev Phosphates Chemicals Company production facilities and phosphate rock mines are located in desert regions. Phosphate mining takes place in the Negev near Beersheba. Phosphate rock produced from the company's three mines (Zin, Oron and Arad) could potentially be incorporated in all products produced. The decision to incorporate phosphate rock from a particular mine for production of specific downstream products is driven by economic considerations. Rotem Amfert Negev is an integrated, multinational phosphate group manufacturing and marketing a comprehensive range of products based on phosphate rock as raw material and leading to downstream derivatives including phosphoric acids, fertilizers, specialty chemicals and phosphate salts. The Rotem's production capacity includes 1.8 million tpa of fertilizers, 540,000 tpa of P₂O₅ fertilizer grade phosphoric acid, more than 100,000 tpa (as P₂O₅) of food grade phosphoric acid, 4 million tpa of phosphate rock, and about 50,000 tpa MKP (monopotassium phosphate).
References	-
News	September 2, 2021 - ICL is still waiting to hear whether its concession to mine phosphates at the Rotem Amfert plant in the eastern Negev will be renewed when it expires at the end of the year. Minister of National Infrastructures, Energy and Water Resources Karin Elharrar has announced that she won't extend the concession for the factory which employs 1,200 people, until an examination into the past royalty payments by ICL has been completed by the Ministry of Finance's Accountant General's office. KAN Channel 11 News has reported that Elharrar has contacted Minister of Finance Avigdor Liberman with a request to expedite matters. At this stage, although it is still only an examination, there could be far reaching consequences if Elharrar ultimately decides not to extend the phosphate concession. Phosphate mining has been conducted at the site for decades under the concession that expires at the end of 2021. As there is only a relatively small amount of phosphates remaining, Elharrar's predecessor Yuval Steinitz decided three years ago to support extending the concession without issuing a tender, on the assumption that there was little likelihood of a new bidder emerging. July 2, 2018 - ICL's Rotem Amfert caused significant pollution to a stream in the Negev last year. Company officials were presented with options to resolve the problem, but the high cost must have deterred them from fixing it. A number of years ago Israel Chemicals Ltd. launched an advertising campaign congratulating itself for its environmental work. “There isn’t a single area of activity that the green virus hasn’t infected,” the narrator of one video clip noted wryly in relation to ICL’s many plants. The company’s operations were presented as one giant project to save the planet and humanity. Of course, the videos did not mention the deep scars that the company’s phosphate mining has caused to the landscape in the Negev or the company’s role in the drop in the level of the Dead Sea. Last week, the Channel 10 program “Hamakor”(“The Source”) broadcast an investigative report on the severe pollution that ICL’s Rotem Amfert subsidiary caused to the Ashalim stream in the Negev last year. The report gave the public a glimpse of the real situation behind the advertising, making use of internal company documents. The ecological disaster in the stream was caused by the collapse of the wall of a pool where effluent generated by Rotem Amfert’s production operations collected. The runoff contained a highly acidic mixture of gypsum and water and various pollutants. The polluted water flowed into the stream, killing plant and animal life the length of the streambed. Senior officials at Rotem Amfert said they had been surprised by what had happened and had no explanation for the collapse, but internal documents disclosed by “Hamakor” showed that company executives had been aware of the potential for the pool wall’s collapse for 20 years, a concern that grew over the years as experts visited the site. The last internal report, issued a year before the accident, stated that there was a real risk. Company officials were presented with options to resolve the problem. From what can be gleaned from the documents, it can be concluded that the high cost involved deterred them from taking the proper decision. Documents presented by the state in response to a request for certification of a class action suit against Rotem Amfert showed that the company had solid information about the risk presented by the wall of the effluent pool. At least some of this information was presented to staff of the Environmental Protection Ministry, but that was only after the Ashalim stream was turned from a wonderful nature reserve into a pollution site for the foreseeable future. The extent of the criminal liability of company executives will be determined only after the Environmental Protection Ministry’s Green Police wrap up their investigation of the incident, but enough information has been presented up to now to require a reexamination of the operations of Israel Chemicals, which has been entrusted by the state with Israel’s most valuable natural resources. Due to the strategic importance of the phosphate mines and the Dead Sea, there appears to be a need for staff to be convened to monitor ICL’s operations, and that would include experts and government ministry representatives. The team would be responsible to assess damage caused by the company in the past and how it can be repaired. The damage includes several important springs in the area whose water quality has been seriously damaged by industrial pollution from ICL’s manufacturing plants. It is essential for the oversight team to have access to all relevant documents. Of course, it should also be made clear to company executives that they would bear criminal liability if it turns out that they had information about an ecological disaster about to happen but chose not to share the information with the government agency that was to have been overseeing their activities. The resources in the Dead Sea and the Negev are too valuable to entrust them without appropriate oversight to those whose only interest is to generate profits from their exploitation. July 4, 2017 - Toxic wastewater that surged through a dry riverbed in southern Israel at the weekend left a wake of ecological destruction more than 20 km (12 miles) long. The flood began last Friday when the 60 meter (yard) high wall of a reservoir at a phosphate factory partially collapsed, letting loose 100,000 cubic meters (26.4 million gallons) of highly acidic wastewater in the Ashalim riverbed. That was enough fluid to fill 40 Olympic-sized pools. The toxic torrent snaked through the desert, singeing anything in its path, before collecting again hours later in a pool several kilometers from the Dead Sea, the lowest point on earth. Days later, the ground is still stained a dark brown and giving off a nauseating acidic stench, more potent than a highly chlorinated swimming pool. One section of the Ashalim riverbed is made up of narrow canyons, popular for hiking, but no one was around when the wastewater first gushed through. Israel’s Ministry of Environment has opened a criminal investigation into the plant’s owner, Rotem Amfert, and its parent company Israel Chemicals (ICL), a leading potash and fertilizer producer with exclusive rights in Israel to mine the Dead Sea. “All the plants and animals in the valley during the tsunami of acid were probably highly damaged, probably dead,” said Oded Netzer, an ecologist for the ministry. “In the long term, there will be soil damage and large functional ecological problems.” He said weeks of intense clean-up work, including pumping out small pools of the wastewater that remain along the path, lay ahead, and complete rehabilitation would likely take years. ICL has stopped using the series of reservoirs where the breech occurred. They contained a production by-product called phosphogypsum water. The company declined to answer questions on the criminal investigation or about the impact the incident will have on its operations. Shares in ICL fell almost 4 percent after the spill but partially recovered to trade 1.3 percent higher on Tuesday. In a statement, Rotem Amfert said it was working “around the clock” in full coordination with authorities, and it would spare no resources to clean up the riverbed.

MTPD - Metric Tonne per Day STPD - Short Ton per Day
MTPA - Metric Tonne per Annum STPA - Short Ton per Annum
SA - Single Absorption
DA - Double Absorption

* Coordinates can be used to locate plant on Google Earth


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