Edition Tag: Sulphur 2021-05-31

Calgary-based Pieridae Energy Ltd says that it has hired a new Chief Operating Officer as from April 5th. Darcy Reding is a professional engineer with 30 years of experience in small and medium-sized private and public upstream oil and gas companies, 20 years of that in leadership roles. Reding spent the last decade at NAL Resources as VP of Operations and VP Operations & Geoscience. Prior to NAL, Reding held technical and leadership roles with Norcen Energy, Northrock Resources, Samson Exploration and Enterra Energy Trust.

There is an old adage that if you put two economists in a room, you will get three different opinions. As the world enters its second year of dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, that certainly still seems to be the case among those grappling with predicting an increasingly uncertain world.

Ineos subsidiary Inovyn has announced the permanent closure of its ‘sulphur chemicals’ (mainly sulphuric acid) plant at its Runcorn site, and its withdrawal from the UK sulphur chemicals market. The company said in a statement that the decision follows a management review of the business in the light of recent events. Specifically, in October 2020, an unexpected interruption to the third-party power supply to the Runcorn site resulted in the plant being taken offline, and during restart, it was identified that a number of critical plant components had suffered significant damage. As a result, to ensure the safety and integrity of the plant it was taken back offline. Since then, in spite of significant effort and investment to rectify these issues, Inovyn says that it has become clear that it will not be possible to safely restart the plant for at least a further 18-24 months, and the company has decided to close the plant permanently.

With declining ore grade feed to a metallurgical smelting process comes an increase in impurity load in the gas cleaning/acid process chain. K. Hasselwander, L. Skilling and C. Bartlett of Metso Outotec discuss a range of process solutions and how to maintain high productivity while keeping costs in check.