It’s a project fit for the Pharaohs: On the Atasta Peninsula in southeastern Mexico, a multinational consortium is working round the clock to build the world’s largest nitrogen plant, a facility that will churn out 1.2 billion cubic feet of the inert gas every day. The economic stakes are high. The $1 billion project is part of an ongoing effort to bolster production from Mexico’s Cantarell oil field in the Bay of Campeche. Nitrogen will be extracted from the air in four huge separation units, then pumped offshore and injected beneath the ocean floor to increase pressure in Cantarell, the biggest oil field in Mexico and the sixth-biggest in the world. But environmental considerations also loom large. That’s because the plant sits in the... [Log in to read more]