January 28, 2014

Taminco Corporation and Balchem Corporation have entered a joint venture to build and operate a choline chloride facility in St. Gabriel, Louisiana in the United States, where both will operate the existing production facilities.

Balchem will contribute its current St. Gabriel choline chloride production assets to the joint venture and both parties will invest into expanding these assets into a world scale production unit, which is expected to come on stream in 2015.

The joint production model will lead to a state-of-the-art unit, using the most advanced technology, generating advantages of scale and providing customers a high quality product and reliable supply chain at competitive cost. Balchem and Taminco will market choline chloride through separate and fully independent channels.

Choline Chloride, a trimethylamine derivative, is widely used as a feed ingredient additive for a variety of animals. The quaternary compound also functions as a clay stabiliser in oil and gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing applications. The safe and benign profile of choline chloride contributes to reducing the environmental footprint for oil and gas development projects.

This new capacity will help to serve the growing North American market, which is underpinned by increasing demand for choline chloride. 

Balchem consists of three business segments: ARC Specialty Products; Food, Pharma & Nutrition; and Animal Nutrition & Health. Through ARC Specialty Products, Balchem provides specialty-packaged chemicals for use in healthcare and other industries. The Food, Pharma & Nutrition segment provides proprietary microencapsulation solutions to a variety of applications in the human food, pharmaceutical and nutrition marketplaces. The Animal Nutrition & Health segment manufactures and supplies products to numerous animal health markets and certain derivative products into industrial applications.

Taminco is the world's largest integrated producer of alkylamines and alkylamine derivatives. Their products are used by customers in the manufacture of a diverse array of products for the agriculture, water treatment, personal & home care, animal nutrition and oil & gas end-markets.