By Kim Soobok (Translation and edits by Hyun Lee)

Continued from Part 2

Along the Chongchon River in Namhung, South Pyongan Province is the massive Namhung Youth Chemical Complex. Established in 1979, it is one of North Korea’s largest fertilizer production plants. Prior to the Arduous March period of the 1990’s and 2000’s, the base material for fertilizer production was a byproduct of oil refining called naphtha. The Namhung Complex, advantageously situated near the Bonghwa Chemical Factory in Sinuiju, one of North Korea’s two oil refineries, had access to an abundant source of naphtha. It is also near Kaechon, the heart of North Korea’s coal production and a supplier of fuel for the complex, as well as Chongchon River, a source of industrial water. The complex used to produce 360,000 tons of urea fertilizer, 25,000 tons of polyethylene and 10,000 tons of acrylic per year.

In the 1990’s, however, the collapse of the Soviet Union and choking economic sanctions led to a steep decline in North Korea’s ability to import crude oil. With no more access to naphtha, fertilizer production lagged. This is when then-North Korean leader Kim Jong-il proposed the production of a new type of fertilizer with anthracite, abundantly available in the mountainous country.

A series of catastrophic floods in 1995 and 1997 paralyzed North Korea’s extractive industries, however, and the task of turning coal into fertilizer was indefinitely put on hold. It took the country many years to fully recover from the flood damage and restore its waterlogged mines. By 2009, the country was able to restore its basic industries, such as vinalon and steel production. Buoyed by technological advancements that enabled accelerated production, North Korea set its goal as becoming a “strong and prosperous nation.” Increasing fertilizer yields to boost grain production was a critical part of meeting this goal.

North Korean scientists and engineers, including experts at the Kimchaek University of Technology, finally succeeded in gasifying anthracite, and in 2009, the country began to mass-produce coal-based fertilizer. It is a complicated process that involves no less than nine steps, including gasification, gas purification, gas compression and ammonia synthesis. They also built a supersized oxygen separator, an essential component in the gasification process, and pulverized coal-fired boilers to increase production efficiency.

According to my notes from my visit there in September 2012, the Namhung Complex produced 350,000 tons of urea fertilizer in 2011-2012. And according to records at North Korea’s National Academy of Sciences in May 2015, the entire country produced 700,000 tons of urea fertilizer and 300,000 tons each of phosphorus and potassium fertilizers, totaling 1.3 million tons that year. Scientists and engineers at the Namhung Complex continue to research ways to increase productivity and efficiency while lowering the production cost. And the more than four hundred chemical byproducts of the fertilizer production process are recycled by the country’s chemical industry as base material for a wide range of products, including paint, polypropylene fiber and pharmaceutical raw materials.