Magazine: Sulphur

Meena Chauhan , Head of Sulphur and Sulphuric Acid Research, Argus Media, assesses price trends and the market outlook for sulphur.

The refining industry, the source of half of the world’s elemental sulphur, continues to face major structural changes from changing feedstock and product slates and increasing regulatory burdens.

The Agricultural Industries Confederation (AIC) has announced the election of Angela Booth as its new Vice Chairman. AIC says that Angela brings many years of broad experience in the industry, including several years as Chair of the AIC Feed Executive Committee, a member of the AIC Board, and several roles on industry executives and committees. She was previously the AB Agri Director of Feed Safety. In her career, Angela has had widespread involvement, including feed safety, operations, quality, nutrition, purchasing, legislation and sustainability.

Using case studies of a refinery amine unit and a sour water stripper (SWS), U. M. Sridhar of Three Ten Initiative Technologies LLP, N. A. Hatcher and R. H. Weiland of Optimized Gas Treating Inc. demonstrate the capabilities of a mechanistic, chemistry-based, truly predictive model for calculating corrosion rates for various amines and for sour water. At a time when asset integrity is much sought after, the utility of this fully predictive model is to prevent failures before they occur, rationally select materials of construction, enhance plant safety, and mitigate risk.

After a poor 2019, when global demand contracted by nearly 2.5%, phosphate markets are expected to rebound in 2020. Saudi Arabia and Morocco dominate new capacity additions while India and Brazil continue to be the key importers. US and Chinese production is in slow decline, meanwhile.

How the processed phosphates market develops over the coming months will be a major factor for the short term outlook for sulphur trends. Improvement is anticipated in the phosphates market from around mid-2020 which may help to support sulphur demand and in turn pricing.

Sulphuric acid plant operators juggle multiple issues trying to keep their plants running efficiently and reliably. With the revolutionary ClearView™ process health monitoring solution, as well the DynSOx™ software for simulating dynamic operation, Haldor Topsoe strives to bring digital services with real and tangible operational benefits to the sulphuric acid industry. P. Szafran and M. Granroth discuss how together these digital services can help acid plant operators meet their daily targets.

Jerry d’Aquin of ConSul Inc. looks at the impact of falling sulphur prices on the US market.