Degussa expands Threonine facility in Hungary

The Business Unit Feed Additives of Degussa GmbH expands the capacity of L-Threonine in Kaba, Hungary. The annual production capability of Agroferm, a fully owned subsidiary of Degussa, will be elevated to 20 000 metric tons Threonine by the end of 2007. In addition to the capacity enlargement, the company will upgrade major fermentation and downstreaming processes to optimize plant efficiency and product design further.

“Right from the beginning, in spring 2004, when Degussa acquired the Agroferm site from Kyowa Hakko Kogyo Co., Ltd., it was our intention to transform the former lysine production into a state-of-the-art L-Threonine plant”, Dr. Hubert Wennemer, President of Feed Additives, explains. “The execution of this investment represents another cornerstone in our amino acid growth strategy”, Wennemer continues.

“Relative to the capital outlay for a greenfield plant of that size, the specific investment cost at Kaba is significantly lower. This cost benefit combined with the fermentation competencies and skills of our Hungarian workforce give us a sustainable competitive advantage”, Sigmar Eisele, President of Agroferm, underlined.

“Nowadays, Europe accounts for over 50% of the global Threonine market and provides further growth potential, especially in the Eastern part. Additionally, the relative importance of the Asian and Latin American continents is expected to rise overproportionally in the coming years”, Dr. Thomas Kaufmann, Vice-President Marketing explained.

The Kaba site is Degussa’s second state-of-the-art Threonine production facility in Europe, bringing the company’s total capacity to 40 000 metric tons per year. The new Threonine production line also frees up fermentation capacity to be used for production of Tryptophan and other amino acids.

This modular concept allows Degussa to react in a flexible manner on increasing customer demand. Hence, the company has the technical capability for de-bottlenecking its two Threonine production sites further.

L-Threonine and L-Tryptophan are building blocks of protein. They are essential in today’s nutritional concepts to balance the amino acid levels in rations and to optimize economics in livestock production while decreasing nitrogen excretion and thereby reducing the environmental impact of livestock farming.