Section: CRUSU Market & Features

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

While the covid pandemic has kept refinery run rates down in 2020, new refinery sulphur capacity will nevertheless form the bulk of new additions to sulphur production over the next few years. But delays to projects on both the supply and demand sides could tip a fairly balanced market in either direction.

N. Clark, B. Avancini and V. Sturm of Clark Solutions discuss a novel technology, SAFEHX® , providing a new approach to the cooling of strong sulphuric acid. Prototype results are shown and indicate a safe and stable cost-effective technology. SAFEHX® can be extended to every heat exchanger system where corrosion, mixture risks, fouling, process liquid loss (or contamination) and temperature control are key concerns.

With the sulphur content of crude oil and natural gas on the increase and with the ever-tightening sulphur content in fuels, refiners and gas processors will require additional sulphur recovery capacity. At the same time, environmental regulatory agencies of many countries continue to promulgate more stringent standards for sulphur emissions from oil, gas and chemical processing facilities. Rameshni & Associates Technology and Engineering discusses options for compliance with new regulations on emissions regarding IMO 2020 compliance and report on the results and evaluation of three case studies. Worley Comprimo reports on the revamp of a sulphur complex built in the late 1980s at a refinery in East Asia with the aim to increase the capacity, improve the availability and reliability and make the unit environmental compliant.

Sulphur’s annual survey of recent, current and future sulphur recovery unit construction projects maps the developing shape of brimstone production from fuel and gas processing plants worldwide.

Metal processing in Northeast Asia is the major source of sulphuric acid exports from the region, and the ramp up of Chinese copper smelter capacity is leading to increased acid availability.

Major projects to consider in the short term outlook are Barzan in Qatar and the Clean Fuels Project in Kuwait. Combined these would add over 3 million t/a of sulphur capacity.

Although 2020 saw a contraction in GDP by 10% due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, the country had been one of the fastest growing of the world’s top 10 economies, with growth of 8.3% in 2016, although this had slowed to 4.1% in 2019. Its population is growing, and it is due to become the most populous country in the world by 2027 according to UN figures, with total population reaching 1.64 billion by 2050. The country thus continues to require more food, leading to rising sulphur/sulphuric acid consumption for the phosphate industry on the one hand, although increasing vehicle use and growth in domestic refining is also leading to some additional sulphur production.

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.

This year’s SulGas conference, covering sulphur recovery and gas treating with a special focus on India and southeast Asia, was run as a virtual event from February 1st to 3rd 2021.