£480,000 Plant For Hornby Works

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30578, 22 October 1964, Page 1

£480,000 Plant For Hornby Works

At an estimated cost of £480,000, a contact sulphuric acid plant will be installed at the Hornby chemical fertiliser works of Kempthorne Prosser and company’s N.Z. Drug Company, Ltd., during the next two years.

Mr H. O. Taylor, general manager, chemical fertiliser works, for the company, said in Auckland yesterday that this plant would increase the annual capacity of the Hornby works to 280,000 tons of fertiliser, double the production for 1963-64.

Tenders are being called, and it is expected that the new plant which will replace the existing lead chamber acid plants, will be in production late in 1966.

The new plant will provide for complete power generation. Waste heat from the process will be converted into steam, and this in turn will drive a large turbo-alternator. Not only will the entire Hornby works be selfsufficient for its own considerable electric power consumption, but there will also be a substantial surplus of power which will be available for

the mains of the Central Canterbury Electric Power Board. Unlike the lead chamber process, which produces relatively weak acid, the contact process produces sulphuric acid at a strength of 98 per cent. This simplifies acid storage, as 98 per cent acid can be stored in ordinary steel tanks not unlike bulk oil storage tanks. There will be two 1000-gallon tanks to store the acid during the hours each day when superphosphate is not being produced. The plant will operate continuously for more than 48 weeks every year. Mr Taylor said that projections of fertiliser demand made by the company, and verified by estimates prepared by independent sources for the Agricultural Development Conference, indicated that this major expansion in production at the Hornby works would meet the demand for many years..