Scarborough-headquartered Sirius Minerals, through its subsidiary York Potash, has signed a ten-year supply and distribution deal with a state-owned company in Qatar for the sale of over 2m tonnes of fertiliser per year.

The exclusive agreement, which would take total aggregate peak sales volumes to 13.8m tonnes per year, has been reached with a firm called Muntajat for POLY4 fertiliser, which would be sold into Africa, Australia, New Zealand and certain Middle Eastern and Asian territories.

Chris Fraser managing director and CEO of Sirius, said: “We are delighted to expand our growing partnership with Qatar through this long-term supply agreement with Muntajat.

“Qatar is already a major investor in Sirius via and we are working with Muntajat to explore the downstream combination of POLY4 with nitrogen products in Qatar and/or the United Kingdom to create a value-added multi-nutrient fertilizer.

“This new supply agreement with Muntajat provides us with access to a number of new markets for POLY4 and further underpins the large scale, international market appetite for POLY4.”

Abdulrahman Ali Al-Abdulla, chief executive officer of Muntajat, said: “We see tremendous potential in POLY4 and Sirius’ Project which will enable us to bring this multi-nutrient product to our extensive global customer network.

“The addition of POLY4 will complement our existing portfolio and will enable us to provide a more complete solution to our customers in these important markets by adding additional macro-nutrients to our portfolio.”

Muntajat markets and distributes about 9m tonnes of fertiliser per year. It has a global marketing network servicing more than 3,000 customers in 135 countries from Doha and 17 international locations.

Sirius Minerals is focused on bringing large scale volumes of POLY4 to the global agriculture industry. POLY4 is the company’s trademarked name for its multi-nutrient fertiliser to be produced from the world’s largest and highest grade polyhalite deposit located in North Yorkshire.

Last month, the business reported that a 500m dollar financing plan had fallen through, meaning it would need to reduce activities at its North Yorkshire Polyhalite project while a strategic review is undertaken.

Sirius intends to tap into what is thought to be the world’s largest deposit of polyhalite beneath the Yorkshire Moors National Park. It already has a mine near Whitby in North Yorkshire.

Two mine shafts will be used to help extract the potash, which will then be transported outside the National Park to Teeside via an underground tunnel for processing. Permission was granted for mining to go ahead by the North York Moors National Park Authority in October 2015.