We expect continued growth there, as I’ve outlined and then in Europe, Europe’s another market that has worked through its high-cost inventory. And in Q4, we’ve seen good engagement. So as Ken said, when we transition into 2024, we see demand stepping up at the midpoint by another 3 million tons next year, which will further support market fundamentals.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Jacob Bout from CIBC. Your line is now open.
Jacob Bout: Good morning. I had a question on the nitrogen division. I think this is the first time that I’ve seen three outages in the same quarter. How much of this is coincidence or maybe just talk through any maintenance and reliability issues. And then any comments on Trinidadian gas supply contracts and availability?
Ken Seitz: For sure, Jacob. Thank you for the question. So yes, we had outages at Geismar, Borger and Trinidad sites and varying reasons there including some of those that you mentioned. Yes, we are also in the middle of a contract negotiation with the National Gas Company in Trinidad. I’ll hand it over to Trevor Williams, our President of the Nitrogen business to talk about those pieces.
Trevor Williams: Hey, good morning, Jacob. And thanks. So a couple of comments. So year-to-date, actually, the majority of our assets have actually run quite well, averaging about 97% capacity utilization, excluding our planned turnarounds. Whoever, as folks have referenced, we did experience some issues with three of our facilities, primarily Trinidad Borger, and Geismar. Now at our Geismar facility typically, historically a top quartile performer. We just undertook on and completed a 5-year major overhaul here in Q3, wherever during the outage and coming out of it, we did experience issues with some large rotating equipment as a result of some quality challenges, which did force us to come back down a couple of times to address those.
Thankfully, those repairs have been completed and now the site is back up and running well and the new capacity – debottleneck capacities. In Trinidad, just really comes down to a story around some of the challenges around some of the gas curtailments. We did experience several I’ll say deeper curtailments through the year that forced us to take some plants offline. As a result of cycling those plants we did experience some equipment failures that required us to come down to make some repairs. Those repairs are underway and we expect the site to return to normal levels of operation here in November. And it’s kind of alluded to we are working with the natural – the national gas company to develop more effect ways you’re going forward to manage some of these curtailments such that we don’t compromise the Trinidad facility here going forward.
And in addition, with some of the recent announcements related to longer-term gas supply, we’re optimistic that of returning back to full capacity over the course of the next couple of years, and we will be taking steps to prepare the site in terms of being able to take maximum advantage of that opportunity. And then finally, from a border perspective, we did have several reliability equipment related issues that were scheduled, actually to be addressed in our 2025 turnaround. However, in order to reestablish the reliability of that facility and safe operation, we did elect to take an outage here in Q4 of this year to address a number of those operational risks, and really set the site up here for a successful run going into the next major turnaround.
And then finally, just a couple of things in terms of overall reliability program just wanted to highlight, the first thing obviously, is really prioritizing a capital to focus on increased uptime and efficiency, obviously, managing the risk associated with our facilities, really doing a lot of work in terms of enhancing our reliability program using data analytics, people skill development, and some organizational structural changes within the organization of the company. And then finally, which is a really a big step forward to us is, is an external monitoring, troubleshooting and optimization through our recently commissioned operations or remote operations center in Loveland, Colorado. And finally, we just put together over the course of the last couple of quarters and infields reliability task team that’s really been put in place in to drive operational improvement through targeted reliability initiatives across the organization.
