President Director of the state-owned fertilizer company Mulyono Prawiro said tender will be held early this year for the construction of Pusri III-B factory.
Meanwhile Pusri II-B is expected to be fully operational this year after completing trial operation in 2016.
"The target is Pusri III-B is to be operational in 2018," Mulyono said here on Tuesday.
He said the revitalization program is important to improve the competitiveness of the company amid the free trade scheme allowing Chinese and Indian products to enter freely the domestic market.
Pusri has to improve efficiency through the revitalization program as the existing production units have been too old and inefficient, he said.
He said the price of Indonesian gas is still too high, but with the new factory there would be efficiency in the use of the feed stock such as Pusri II-B that could save 14.87 mmbtu per ton of urea fertilizer.
PT Pupuk Sriwijaya hopes that its urea and NPK fertilizer production would rise 20 percent in 2017 with the operation of Pusri II-B at full capacity.
Altogether, the performance of Pusri is expected to grow 20 percent in 2017, Mulyono said.
Pusri is optimistic that target could be reached based on performance in 2016 when urea and NPK fertilizer production was higher than expectation.
In 2016, Pusri produced 1,222,270 tons of ammonia and 1,671,160 tons of urea and 71,810 tons of NPK.(*)
Editor: Heru Purwanto
Copyright © ANTARA 2017
