“Crimean Titan” has been Russified and will be revived through capital injections

The Crimean Titan plant, after a change of owner, ended its existence as a Ukrainian enterprise.

Since 2014, there have been two legal entities - PJSC Crimean Titan, registered in Kyiv under the name Ukrainian Chemical Products, and the Moscow LLC Titanium Investments, which included a branch in Armyansk, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.

Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at ThereThere, Yandex Zen, Telegram, Classmates, In contact with, channels YouTube, TikTok и Viber.
To subscribe to notifications in your browser, click here.

At the end of last year, the plant changed its owner. Ukrainian Chemical Products, owned by Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, sold its assets in Crimea. The new owner of the Armenian branch of Titanium Investments LLC is the Russian Titan company, registered in Barnaul. The management company is JSC Russian Hydrogen. Since the beginning of 2022, the plant has stopped working due to the cessation of supplies of ilmenite, the main raw material for the production of titanium dioxide.

“We buy raw materials in Asia; there are no raw materials in the Russian Federation yet. For this reason, one of the two workshops is operating; we produce 55-60% of production volumes,” explained Eduard Kurmachev, director of the Titanium Investments LLC branch. – The main bet is on the Russian market. Its capacity is 80-85 thousand tons per year, and we can produce 110 thousand tons and export to the Asian market - China, South Korea, India.”

In the 70s, the plant was designed for raw materials from the Irshansky mining and processing plant in the Zhitomir region and the Volnogorsk in the Dnepropetrovsk region. Returning supplies from Ukrainian fields is economically profitable and correct from the point of view of the production cycle. But so far there is not even railway access to the plant - in 2015, nationalists from the Right Sector blew up the dam along which the railway tracks ran, and now it needs to be restored. Fortunately, access to the dam was provided by the Russian military. They also guard the airspace over a chemical plant located in the border zone with Ukraine.

Until 2014, titanium dioxide from Crimea came to 62 countries, now – to 15. Previous supplies of equipment from Europe over the past few years have been compensated by Asian manufacturers. They are counted on in terms of modernization and reconstruction of production, designed for 5 years. The total investment will be 20 billion rubles.

Fertilizer production, which was stopped at Titan in 2014, will resume with the supply of apatite from the Kola Peninsula and the supply of ammonia by rail. Ammophos was valued by Crimean farmers for its complex of phosphorus and nitrogen, which affects the quality of products. The monthly shipment of 18 thousand tons of ammophos is also provided for in railway cars, and previously, representatives of the plant management and the Council of Ministers voiced plans to lay rails from the Armyansk station to the Zavodskaya station in order to connect production with the infrastructure of the Crimean Bridge. The project was estimated at 576 million rubles and two years of construction. For some reason, its implementation under the previous owner did not take place.

The “road map” for minimizing the impact on the natural environment also had to be shifted. It was approved after an environmental disaster in 2018, when a shallow acid reservoir exposed the bottom, and toxic dust spread throughout the area, burning plants and rusting metal products. To avoid a repeat of the emergency situation, Titan was allowed to uncork its water extraction wells and was required to build a station to neutralize acidic wastewater. But the plans were interrupted by the coronavirus, and the acid and limestone must be converted into building gypsum by the end of this year.

Now the acid storage level is 1 meter 85 cm. Acid waste is still diluted with water from underground sources. To pump from the North Crimean Canal, the connecting canal must be cleared of vegetation, and it will take another 6-8 months to fill the technical reservoir.