Section: CRUSU Market & Features

As all industries come under pressure to decarbonise, are there ways to reduce the carbon footprint of sulphur recovery operations?

A sulphuric acid plant forms critical material and energy interfaces with other plants in several different types of chemical and metallurgical complexes. Shailesh Sampat of SNC-Lavalin discusses how the acid plant design is customised to match the product mix and the energy requirements of the complex to provide the optimum solution for energy and material requirements.

Ricardo L. Sepulveda of PegasusTSI reviews options to decrease the CO2 footprint of a fertilizer industrial complex and illustrates the technical and economic feasibility of utilising clean energy from a sulphuric acid plant in a fertilizer complex to produce green hydrogen, which in turn can be used to produce green methanol or green ammonia.

Developments in the Russia-Ukraine conflict is going to be a key influence for the sulphur market through the year. The potential loss of Russian sulphur to key import markets such as North Africa and Latin America is likely to lead to trade flows increasing to these regions from the Middle East and North America.

A new cost-effective alternative sulphur technology, providing a simple and robust process to achieve an overall sulphur recovery efficiency of 99.9+% is being developed by Saudi Aramco. J. P. O’Connell and I.A. Alami of Saudi Aramco discuss the new technology, its benefits and current stage of development.

A complete listing of all articles and news items that appeared in Sulphur magazine during 2021.

Decreasing the carbon intensity of sulphur recovery is one of the many actions that operators can take to help meet their climate ambitions. It is also becoming increasingly rewarding financially because of the rising cost of carbon emissions. In this article, G. Kidambi of Shell Projects & Technology demonstrates the potential to cut the carbon intensity of tail gas treating units by more than 50% through swapping to the latest SCOT ULTRA amine solvent and catalyst technologies.

The processed phosphates market will be a major indicator for price direction for sulphur markets in 2022. A significant downward correction is expected in DAP prices with early signals prices could soften in the February-March period.

As the world looks to a lower carbon future, refineries are having to examine their operating models, and look to, for example, renewable hydrogen production for desulphurisation technologies.

N. A. Hatcher, D. R. Jensen , and P. L. Ott of Optimized Gas Treating Inc. provide a technology overview of ProBot™ – a unit monitoring system developed by OGT to digitalise the sulphur processing assets in a facility in a manner that facilitates knowledge retention, rapid optimisation, and plant troubleshooting. ProBot™ has been built to allow rapid access to a virtual plant platform that provides advice, training and, monitoring to enable more efficient, safe, reliable, and environmentally friendly plant operations.