Pivdennyi Port in Odesa Oblast stores 9,600 tons of ammonium nitrate, the same chemical that caused a devastating explosion in Beirut, Lebanon, killing at least 154 people on Aug. 4, the port said.
Responding to media reports about a large stock of ammonium nitrate in the Pivdennyi Port, the port administration said it is packaged in special flexible industrial containers and is therefore safe.
Ammonium nitrate is a chemical used in fertilizer. The amount stored in the port near Odesa is four times more than the amount that exploded in Beirut, which is alleged to be 2,750 tons.
“When packaged in ‘big bags,’ ammonium nitrate is not explosive,” the port authority said in a statement posted on Facebook on Aug. 6. “It complies with all technological requirements.”
The port also says it unloads and transfers ammonium nitrate in accordance with international maritime rules for dangerous goods transportation.
“It is the transshipment of ammonium nitrate in bulk that can be dangerous. But this method of transshipment has never been used in the Pivdennyi Port,” the administration said.
Another Ukrainian seaport, the Mykolaiv Port, said it doesn’t currently store any ammonium nitrate but did store 3,100 tons of it in 2018-2019.
Following the blasts in Lebanon, all companies that store ammonium nitrate in Ukraine will undergo a safety check by the government, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said on Aug. 6.
The chances of such a stock of ammonium nitrate exploding in Ukraine are close to zero, according to Sergiy Ruban, the head of the Association of Manufacturers, Importers and Traders of Agrochemistry and Agrotechnologies in Ukraine.
“If these goods are separated and there is no critical mass – this is a very serious guarantee that no negative processes will occur,” Ruban told the Kyiv Post.
The spokesperson for TransInvestService (TIS), Ukraine’s largest private terminal operator that has its cargo terminals in the Pivdennyi water area, said that their company stopped storing ammonium nitrate in 2008.
“Precisely for security reasons,” TIS spokesperson Anastasia Zhuk told the Kyiv Post, relaying a message from the company’s chief engineer.
There are strict rules for storing and processing ammonium nitrate in Ukraine. Special bags with ammonium nitrate should not be loaded on top of each other, they should be in compartments separated by fire barriers with no more than 1,200 tons in each. Each warehouse should have no more than 3,500 tons of ammonium nitrate and should not contain other chemicals.
There is also a six-month “warranty period” for ammonium nitrate in which “absolutely nothing” can happen to it, according to Ruban. Ukraine usually consumes between 1.5 to 2 million tons of ammonium nitrate a year, he says, so it’s usually used in the same season when it was produced.
“And even beyond this warranty period, for it to explode, some very specific conditions must be created,” Ruban says. “There was no such accident in the history of Ukraine.”
Beirut suffered two explosions on Aug. 4, the second much bigger, destroying large swaths of the city and causing over $3 billion in damage, according to local authorities. Among the 5,000 people wounded, over 1,000 have been hospitalized, and 120 are in critical condition.
Local authorities say that the second explosion was most likely caused by a 2,750-ton stockpile of ammonium nitrate. It came from a Russian-owned cargo ship that was abandoned in Beirut on its way from Georgia to Mozambique in November 2013. Authorities believe that its cargo was offloaded to the port’s warehouses, the site of the explosion.
