Magazine: Sulphur

H.J. Baker’s chief operating officer (COO) Luis Masroua has become president of the company.

Inshan S. Mohammed of Sulfur Recovery Engineering shares lessons learned from a recent SRU shutdown assistance programme involving an error with the tags used within the BMS system installed on a direct-fired reheater.

T he end of August saw a paper published in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society by Dr Mark Maslin of University College London. Widely reported, it looked at the prospects for sulphur production in an era of declining fossil fuel use, concluding that there could be “a shortfall in the annual supply of sulphuric acid of between 100 and 320 million tonnes by 2040, depending on how quickly decarbonisation occurs”. It added that “unless action is taken to reduce the need for sulphuric acid, a massive increase in environmentally damaging mining will be required to fulfil this resource demand.”

A large portion of the oil reserves of Canada and Venezuela exist as oil sands. By the mid-2000s, production from these sources had topped 5.5 million bbl/d. But with Venezuela’s economic implosion and increasing environmental scrutiny of oil sands production, what is the future for this high sulphur fuel source?

Marco van Son and Frank Bela of Comprimo share lessons learned from SRU war stories, including: inadvertent NH3 destruction in an oxidising atmosphere, rich amine emulsion, SWS fixed valve trays, H2 spiking of SRU feed, rich amine flash drum early warning, V-ball fuel gas safety shutoff valves, TGTU methyl mercaptan, and commissioning and Murphy’s Law.

Saudi Arabia’s Ras Al-Khair Industrial City has signed an industrial land agreement with local firm Gulf Copper to develop a copper smelting and casting plant at an investment $319.30 million. The project would be developed on a plot spanning more than 250,000 square metres in the industrial city. No construction timelines were given. The Saudi government has previously signed agreements with Trafigura and Saudi-based Modern Mineral Holding to develop a 400,000 t/a copper smelter at Ras Al Khair which would also include 200,000 t/a of zinc and 55,000 t/a of lead smelter capacity at a projected cost of $2.8 billion.

While most sulphuric acid demand for phosphates is based on the production of phosphate fertilizer, non-fertilizer sources of demand such as animal feed and industrial processes additionally represent a relatively small but growing sector of the market.

The purpose of this article is to emphasise the lessons learned by ADNOC Sour Gas in the material upgrading of the Shah sulphur granulation plant due to severe corrosion of the aluminium components. The sulphur granulation plant was commissioned in 2015 and consists of a total of 12 granulating systems used for solidifying and granulating the liquid sulphur. The study focused on the corroded areas, namely the GX plenum chambers, the lower section of the granulator exhaust stack, the scrubber inlet and the discharge ducting.

Temperature dependent rate constants for the hydrolysis of CS2 and COS across Claus Al2 O3 and TiO2 catalysts are valuable tools for the design and optimisation of new, as well as existing, sulphur recovery units. In this context, Alberta Sulphur Research Ltd (ASRL) has measured CS2 and COS hydrolysis rates over a range of temperatures for both Al2 O3 and TiO2 catalysts under start-of-run and, more recently, end-of-run first converter conditions. In this article Christopher Lavery, Dao Li, Ruohong Sui, and Robert A. Marriott of ASRL report on their methodology and the utility of the kinetics calculated from their data and draw comparisons between the start-of-run and end-of-run results.

Reduced appetite for sulphur from processed phosphates producers in China will continue to place downwards pressure on pricing in the near term. l Phosphates-based demand is likely to remain low in the second half of 2022 as issues surrounding affordability persist, slowing import requirements.