Aliphos production starts in Dunkirk By Sjo Zwart, Aliphos


The Aliphos production site has come into service in Dunkirk. The new plant will operate 24/7, on the site of a former refinery. 220,000 tonnes dicalcium phosphate dihydrate yearly will be produced under the brand name Aliphos®


Dical+ . The Dunkirk site will initially serve France and other European


countries. The surplus will be exported outside the continent through the port of Dunkirk. The location will enable the group to reduce its logistics costs and its ecological footprint.


Why Dunkirk? Over the past years many options in North West Europe for building a new feed phosphate factory have been studied. In the end, Dunkirk came out as the best solution. The new site offers:


o Sufficient space for the feed phosphate plant with additional space available for possible extensions.


o An industrial infrastructure where partners providing complementary materials can also install themselves.


The total investment amounts to 85 million euros and will create 90 local jobs (45 directly and 45 indirectly), with an annual turnover estimated at 100 million euros. With its two other plants in the Netherlands and Bulgaria, Aliphos is becoming the main European producer of animal feed phosphates, with an installed capacity of 620,000 tonnes per year. The Dunkirk site is a state-of-the-art production site, the first


in Europe to put on the market a dicalcium phosphate (DCP) of exceptional quality. New-generation technology, which is based on Ecophos’s innovative phosphate extraction techniques, results in Aliphos®


Dical+ having the highest phosphorus digestibility amongst


calcium phosphates available on the market. It enables farmers to feed animals with high quality diets, while reducing the release of phosphorus into waste and contributing to preserving the world’s limited stocks of phosphates.


Aliphos, a subsidiary of the Belgian Ecophos group, is the largest producer of inorganic feed phosphates in Europe. Aliphos has three production sites in Europe: Rotterdam (The Netherlands), Devnya (Bulgaria), and now Dunkirk (France). The total production capacity is 620,000 tonnes per year. With the latest production units coming soon into service in India and Egypt, the objective is to become the largest producer of inorganic feed phosphates on a global scale by 2020 with a presence on 3 continents and an installed capacity of 1 million tonnes per year. The Belgian group Ecophos was created in 1996 by Mohamed Takhim. Employing 300 people, the group has its headquarters and its main research center at Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium), and has a design and engineering office in Lummen, Belgium and a centre of excellence in Devnya, Bulgaria.


PAGE 50 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2018 FEED COMPOUNDER


o Excellent logistics (by ship/barge, train or truck) for receiving raw materials and shipping finished product.


o Proximity to our core markets in Europe. o Ecophos foresees further developments at Dunkirk, both for new products aimed at the animal feed sector as well as for other applications.


Phosphorus: a finite material Phosphorus is an essential element in the development of all living organisms – humans, animals and plants. It is, in fact, a constituent part of our bodies. Phosphorus is extracted from phosphate rock but, a little like oil, world resources of high-quality phosphate rock will run out in approximately 80 to 100 years. Hence the urgency to find innovative solutions in this field if we want to avoid a serious food crisis. But bear in mind that only 6% of rock phosphate worldwide is used to produce mineral feed phosphates (most of the rock, 90%, is used to produce mineral fertilizers). The applied production technology enables lower quality phosphate rock, which up to now has been very little used, to be put to effective use. Aliphos is the first in the world to industrially extract phosphates using this technology from these types of phosphate rock. Furthermore, this technology enables production and energy costs to be reduced by 30%.


Producing for purity At Aliphos Dunkirk plant, the innovative Ecophos technology will be applied to produce dihydrate dicalcium phosphate from a variety of raw material sources. The factory has been specifically designed to offer full flexibility in terms of raw material usage. The technology developed by Ecophos is more sustainable than the traditional processes as rock grades currently considered as not-usable with


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