[By our guest columnist - 'Thiophilos']
Through most of a long career of having something to do with sulphur as well as sulfur, soufre, schwefel, azufre, cera, and dozens more it has never ceased to amaze this commentator how poorly understood the role of elemental sulphur is in the life we humans enjoy for a few score years. At this festive time of the year 2010 it might not be inappropriate for all of us “in the business” to pause and give thanks for element number 16 and ponder a little on where we might be without it. With some careful thought and due consideration we might even decide to make a New Year resolution that we should try and make 2011 the year in which we worked harder to propagate a better and more positive image for the yellow element.
By far the majority of the humans on this planet Earth harbour a vision of sulphur as an evil, smelly (which it is not), dangerous, and totally environmentally unfriendly component of the nether regions of the planet, where it should ideally be sequestered along with all the nasty GHG’s that are so much front and centre in our current confabulations about climate. A miniscule minority of humanity have some limited understanding of the absolutely key role that elemental sulphur, as a precursor in fertilizer manufacture, plays in feeding six and a half billion of their fellow kind worldwide. Its marketing in that essential part of world commerce is played as very much the “second fiddle” to its agricultural orchestral partners of phosphate, nitrogen, and potash. Much of the first of these members of the “major fertilizer family” would not even be available to the plants that we grow to feed the masses if it were not for the millions of tons of yellow sulphur that are used annually to liberate it from the insoluble rock into which Mother Nature sequestered it as she built the place we live on. Those of us “in the know” talk among ourselves about the key link between sulphur and the food we eat but we do a lousy job in linking that talk to the critical importance of yellow, awful, “smelly” sulphur in the overall process.
Why? Are we afraid that a couple of billion people might stop eating if they knew that sulphur had played a role in producing their bread, their rice, their vegetables, their sugar cane, their fruit, the feed their meat animals eat? It might just possibly be a rough and ready remedy for the current obesity crisis some parts of the world seem to be going through, but hardly a socially acceptable one. Not only has elemental sulphur become a very essential raw material of modern agriculture, it is now one of the largest raw material components of the chemical fertilizer industry. How many of you ‘in the business’ make any effort to communicate and educate homo (not so) sapiens of this fact? Would you even think of a word of appreciation of this kind on your Christmas cards? You might get locked away with the crazy people if you tried!
But public ignorance of the role of sulphur in agriculture is not alone on the docket of devilry the demos (as in democracy) have decided to adopt. How many know that most of the metals used in everything from the structures they live and travel in to the electronic magic their digital devices deliver, would still be sequestered in the rocks of Mother Earth if it were not for the sulphuric acid made from sulphur that was used to leach them out of the ores and refine them into their presently usable form?
There are also many other industrial uses of sulphur, both as such and in its sulphuric acid form, which are “hidden” from public view but essential in sustaining the modern life we all live. But poor old sulphur gets little credit and even less recognition. Is it our inherited aversion to the stuff that gets in the way or is it our unwillingness to communicate to the society we serve just how valuable sulphur is in making our life as comfortable as it is ? And whether you agree or not at this greetings time of the year - it is.
And that is not the whole story. Good old sulphur is at the heart of brand new semiconductor materials that are being used in solar energy collectors and a variety of next generation electronic marvels with micromaterial properties that will add a new environmentally friendly dimension to the near magical uses of the yellow element. Yes, Mother Nature carefully planned some very special uses for element number 16 and it is about time that all of us in the business brushed up on our real knowledge of sulphur and started passing on the good news to the masses. A Merry Christmas and a Great Sulphurous New Year.
‘Thiophilos’
Monday 15 November 2010
When is a glut not a glut?
Listening to presentations at this year’s Sulphur conference, it became increasingly clear to me that there is a great deal of uncertainty over sulphur availability over the medium to long term.
On the one hand, there is the familiar story of the continuing threat to the market from large new sulphur-generating projects, particularly in the Middle East. In Abu Dhabi, the Shah sour gas project has been delayed by the withdrawal of ConocoPhillips from the consortium in April, and the timescale has now been pushed back to 2014, but there will nevertheless be 10,000 t/d of sulphur being produced and marketed once it is up and running. In Qatar the Common Sulphur Project is now complete and as new LNG trains and the massive Pearl GTL plant ramp up production, so more gas is processed and more sulphur removed for sale, ultimately planned to reach a figure of 12,000 t/d.
In China development of the Sichuan sour gas fields is proceeding apace, with several million tonnes per year of sulphur to be recovered by the end of the decade, while in the Caspian Sea, huge projects such as Tengiz and Kashagan also have the potential for large sulphur surpluses, and further inland Turkmenistan and Russia are also developing their sour gas reserves. But there are caveats to many of these projects; at the moment all of the sour gas from Tengiz is planned to be re-injected to drive oil production, and there will be no extra sulphur, and Kashagan’s sulphur production has been capped at 3,800 t/a. Delays to major projects occasioned by the financial crisis have pushed back some of these large projects, in the case of Shah, as noted above, by a couple of years at least. At the moment predictions still indicate a significant sulphur surplus over the coming decade, but this has dropped from several million tonnes per year to less than two, and there are also trends in both supply and demand that could cut this still further.
As several speakers noted, for example, the amount of sulphur recovered from natural gas in North America is declining. The boom in low-sulphur shale gas production, which threatens to turn the United States into a gas exporter, has raised output from that source at the same time that production from Canadian sour gas fields continues to decline rapidly. Sulphur extraction from oil sands is being delayed, in Canada by logistical and environmental questions, and in Venezuela by financing and political uncertainty. And all the time, new demand from burgeoning phosphate markets, supported by continuing high phosphate prices, have conspired to keep markets tight. The new Ma’aden project in Saudi Arabia, will now be on-stream by the end of this year, consuming large volumes of sulphur. Some much-delayed nickel leaching projects are also starting up, at Goro in New Caledonia and Ambatovy in Madagascar, again with major sulphur demand for acid production.
There have been dire predictions of a massive glut of sulphur for several years, and yet so far it has not seemed to materialise. Events have conspired to keep sulphur markets tight – perhaps not as tight as the astonishing days of 2008, and yet still tight enough that, as a consequence, f.o.b. sulphur prices are in the vicinity of $200/t and show no signs of falling at present.
Looking to the longer term, as Professor Peter Clark of ASRL has pointed out, continuing substitution of fossil energy by biofuels, renewable energy sources and nuclear, and especially more efficient use of fossil fuels, all actually point to lower sulphur availability in coming decades. Global stockpiles of 20 million tonnes actually only represent a few months’ worth of demand, even if they could all be melted down and sold on. A few years ago it was assumed that sour crude and natural gas processing had sounded the death knell of Frash mining, but sustained prices in their current range could see some of those sulphur mines return to production.
On the one hand, there is the familiar story of the continuing threat to the market from large new sulphur-generating projects, particularly in the Middle East. In Abu Dhabi, the Shah sour gas project has been delayed by the withdrawal of ConocoPhillips from the consortium in April, and the timescale has now been pushed back to 2014, but there will nevertheless be 10,000 t/d of sulphur being produced and marketed once it is up and running. In Qatar the Common Sulphur Project is now complete and as new LNG trains and the massive Pearl GTL plant ramp up production, so more gas is processed and more sulphur removed for sale, ultimately planned to reach a figure of 12,000 t/d.
In China development of the Sichuan sour gas fields is proceeding apace, with several million tonnes per year of sulphur to be recovered by the end of the decade, while in the Caspian Sea, huge projects such as Tengiz and Kashagan also have the potential for large sulphur surpluses, and further inland Turkmenistan and Russia are also developing their sour gas reserves. But there are caveats to many of these projects; at the moment all of the sour gas from Tengiz is planned to be re-injected to drive oil production, and there will be no extra sulphur, and Kashagan’s sulphur production has been capped at 3,800 t/a. Delays to major projects occasioned by the financial crisis have pushed back some of these large projects, in the case of Shah, as noted above, by a couple of years at least. At the moment predictions still indicate a significant sulphur surplus over the coming decade, but this has dropped from several million tonnes per year to less than two, and there are also trends in both supply and demand that could cut this still further.
As several speakers noted, for example, the amount of sulphur recovered from natural gas in North America is declining. The boom in low-sulphur shale gas production, which threatens to turn the United States into a gas exporter, has raised output from that source at the same time that production from Canadian sour gas fields continues to decline rapidly. Sulphur extraction from oil sands is being delayed, in Canada by logistical and environmental questions, and in Venezuela by financing and political uncertainty. And all the time, new demand from burgeoning phosphate markets, supported by continuing high phosphate prices, have conspired to keep markets tight. The new Ma’aden project in Saudi Arabia, will now be on-stream by the end of this year, consuming large volumes of sulphur. Some much-delayed nickel leaching projects are also starting up, at Goro in New Caledonia and Ambatovy in Madagascar, again with major sulphur demand for acid production.
There have been dire predictions of a massive glut of sulphur for several years, and yet so far it has not seemed to materialise. Events have conspired to keep sulphur markets tight – perhaps not as tight as the astonishing days of 2008, and yet still tight enough that, as a consequence, f.o.b. sulphur prices are in the vicinity of $200/t and show no signs of falling at present.
Looking to the longer term, as Professor Peter Clark of ASRL has pointed out, continuing substitution of fossil energy by biofuels, renewable energy sources and nuclear, and especially more efficient use of fossil fuels, all actually point to lower sulphur availability in coming decades. Global stockpiles of 20 million tonnes actually only represent a few months’ worth of demand, even if they could all be melted down and sold on. A few years ago it was assumed that sour crude and natural gas processing had sounded the death knell of Frash mining, but sustained prices in their current range could see some of those sulphur mines return to production.
Tuesday 5 October 2010
The return of geoengineering
This blog has mentioned the subject of so-called ‘geoengineering’ before – a series of proposed technologies designed to work on a planetary scale to slow or mitigate the effect of global warming. The reason it remains a topic of relevance to readers of this magazine is that, of all of the techniques proposed, those involving burning large volumes of sulphur to create sulphur dioxide in order to reflect sunlight at high altitudes seem to be the most feasible.
The cooling effect of high-level SO2 has long been documented. In 1991-2 planetary temperatures were cooled by about 0.6C by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which put an estimated 15-30 million tonnes of SO2 into the atmosphere. Similar effects were observed after the Krakatoa eruption in 1883. The argument is that if the emissions were more targeted, both in terms of geographical location and atmospheric height level, even greater changes could be achieved by smaller amounts of SO2. A study published in April in Atmospheric, Chemistry and Physics Discussions reported that modelling had indicated continuous injection of 5 million t/a of SO2 into the upper atmosphere might be able to achieve a 0.7C global temperature reduction (taking us back to pre-industrial levels), albeit with considerable regional variation.
Ironically, our success in reducing SO2 emissions from burning sulphur-containing fuels may have actually exacerbated the problem, as we used to put several tens of million tonnes of SO2 into the lower atmosphere every year. While this low level SO2 caused great damage to human health and the environment and caused the ‘acid rain’ phenomenon, enough reached the upper atmosphere to lead to a mild cooling effect which we no longer enjoy. It has on the other hand also provided us with stockpiles of tens of millions of tonnes of sulphur around the world for which we are continually searching for a use. Producing five million t/a of SO2 would require 2.5 million t/a of elemental sulphur – a readily achievable total on current production/storage levels.
While geoengineering was once an area that brought together a handful of ‘lateral thinkers’ with some of the stranger fringes of the global warming debate, as a global deal on reducing carbon emissions post-Kyoto has continued to prove elusive, so the topic has steadily become more mainstream as an item for discussion. A number of prominent scientists now argue that – in the absence of a comprehensive climate change deal - humanity needs some sort of ‘Plan B’. It is a planetary-scale Pascal’s Wager – the theory is that the scale of the risks and potential benefits make it imperative to at least put some serious money into researching the area, whatever our beliefs or viewpoint might be. In September last year the Royal Society in London said almost exactly this in a report on global warming. Other supporters have included such disparate personalities as Nobel chemistry laureate Paul Crutzen, Edward Teller the so-called “father of the hydrogen bomb”, economists and ‘Freakanomics’ authors Steven Levett and Stephen Dubner, Bill Gates and Richard Branson. Now in a report published just a few weeks ago, Dr David Keith at the University of Calgary has chimed in with some ideas on mirrored nanoparticles and sulphuric acid aerosols.
However, environmentalists have been loudly critical of the idea, most notably because they argue it is a seductive illusion, treating the symptoms rather than the disease, and allowing us to think we can engineer our way out of climate change without having to change our lifestyles. The effect on the ozone layer would be predictably adverse, while the long-term effect of high levels of CO2 and SO2 remains difficult to predict and could have any number of unplanned and unpleasant side effects. Even the study referred to above predicted potentially catastrophic changes to regional rainfall patterns, for example. But more than that, it is argued, once we had embarked down the road of geoengineering, we would be unable to stop. The underlying concentration of carbon dioxide would continue to rise, and any halt in sulphur injections, even for a year or two, could cause warming to rebound at a rate 10 to 20 times that of the recent past - a phenomenon referred to as the "termination problem". Once we start engineering the atmosphere we could be trapped, forever dependent on sulphur injections.
Carbon dioxide sequestration is of course itself a form of geoengineering, albeit one with more predictable consequences, and for that there is considerable government support, at least in Europe and North America. At the moment the debate still rages over SO2 injection between those who say we cannot afford to take the risk, and those who say we cannot afford not to, but it remains an open question as to how long will it be before a government somewhere decides that SO2 injection is a cheaper option.
The cooling effect of high-level SO2 has long been documented. In 1991-2 planetary temperatures were cooled by about 0.6C by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which put an estimated 15-30 million tonnes of SO2 into the atmosphere. Similar effects were observed after the Krakatoa eruption in 1883. The argument is that if the emissions were more targeted, both in terms of geographical location and atmospheric height level, even greater changes could be achieved by smaller amounts of SO2. A study published in April in Atmospheric, Chemistry and Physics Discussions reported that modelling had indicated continuous injection of 5 million t/a of SO2 into the upper atmosphere might be able to achieve a 0.7C global temperature reduction (taking us back to pre-industrial levels), albeit with considerable regional variation.
Ironically, our success in reducing SO2 emissions from burning sulphur-containing fuels may have actually exacerbated the problem, as we used to put several tens of million tonnes of SO2 into the lower atmosphere every year. While this low level SO2 caused great damage to human health and the environment and caused the ‘acid rain’ phenomenon, enough reached the upper atmosphere to lead to a mild cooling effect which we no longer enjoy. It has on the other hand also provided us with stockpiles of tens of millions of tonnes of sulphur around the world for which we are continually searching for a use. Producing five million t/a of SO2 would require 2.5 million t/a of elemental sulphur – a readily achievable total on current production/storage levels.
While geoengineering was once an area that brought together a handful of ‘lateral thinkers’ with some of the stranger fringes of the global warming debate, as a global deal on reducing carbon emissions post-Kyoto has continued to prove elusive, so the topic has steadily become more mainstream as an item for discussion. A number of prominent scientists now argue that – in the absence of a comprehensive climate change deal - humanity needs some sort of ‘Plan B’. It is a planetary-scale Pascal’s Wager – the theory is that the scale of the risks and potential benefits make it imperative to at least put some serious money into researching the area, whatever our beliefs or viewpoint might be. In September last year the Royal Society in London said almost exactly this in a report on global warming. Other supporters have included such disparate personalities as Nobel chemistry laureate Paul Crutzen, Edward Teller the so-called “father of the hydrogen bomb”, economists and ‘Freakanomics’ authors Steven Levett and Stephen Dubner, Bill Gates and Richard Branson. Now in a report published just a few weeks ago, Dr David Keith at the University of Calgary has chimed in with some ideas on mirrored nanoparticles and sulphuric acid aerosols.
However, environmentalists have been loudly critical of the idea, most notably because they argue it is a seductive illusion, treating the symptoms rather than the disease, and allowing us to think we can engineer our way out of climate change without having to change our lifestyles. The effect on the ozone layer would be predictably adverse, while the long-term effect of high levels of CO2 and SO2 remains difficult to predict and could have any number of unplanned and unpleasant side effects. Even the study referred to above predicted potentially catastrophic changes to regional rainfall patterns, for example. But more than that, it is argued, once we had embarked down the road of geoengineering, we would be unable to stop. The underlying concentration of carbon dioxide would continue to rise, and any halt in sulphur injections, even for a year or two, could cause warming to rebound at a rate 10 to 20 times that of the recent past - a phenomenon referred to as the "termination problem". Once we start engineering the atmosphere we could be trapped, forever dependent on sulphur injections.
Carbon dioxide sequestration is of course itself a form of geoengineering, albeit one with more predictable consequences, and for that there is considerable government support, at least in Europe and North America. At the moment the debate still rages over SO2 injection between those who say we cannot afford to take the risk, and those who say we cannot afford not to, but it remains an open question as to how long will it be before a government somewhere decides that SO2 injection is a cheaper option.
Trying to please all and satisfying none
[By our guest columnist, ‘Thiophilos’]
PennWell’s third annual Oil Sands and Heavy Oils Technology (OSHOT) conference showed up on schedule in Calgary in July, in the midst of more media madness on the topic of the environmental impact resulting from society’s continuing love affair with energy from converting the energy which Mother Nature (over many millions of years) put in the carbon-hydrogen bond into the energy needed to drive its ever more luxurious life style – for some.
It is hardly surprising that the sulphur recovered from the world’s second largest hydrocarbon reserve - in Alberta - (notwithstanding Colonel Hugo’s recent claims for Orinoco) was again featured in a whole day session on the yellow element. It is recovered during the upgrading and refining of a present 1.5 million bbl/d of daily oil sands bitumen production that is predicted to reach 3.5 million bbl/d by 2025. At a near 5% sulphur content this could mean over 9 million t/a of the yellow element from Alberta’s oil sand production alone. And all of this in the face of rising world wide production from sourer conventional hydrocarbon production and possible competition for its use in fertilizer manufacture. All of these factors popped up somewhere, somehow in the presentations and active and full discussion session that followed.
If there was one message that emerged from the day long dialogue on dirty sulphur from dirty oilsand it was the harder sulphur tries the more bad press it attracts. We try to please all and end up satisfying none. With sea floor oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, and US congressmen calling for Americans (the world’s most extravagant users of the stuff) to strike Alberta off its “to visit” list until the oil sands production (which goes mostly to them!!) is stopped, it is indeed a hard task to respond responsibly to the demands for less emissions and more production. But, notwithstanding the mood of the media and by extension the people their readers, the industry keeps on trying, regretfully without too much public relations success.
The rigor of regulation, and the resulting hoops that must be jumped through in the process of design and operation of facilities to handle the recovered sulphur, was reviewed and commented on by Rob Mann of Alberta Sulphur Terminals (Hazco). The harder you try, the longer it takes, and it is not for the faint of heart was the message. While doing all of this handling, storage and transportation, Glenn Weagle of IPAC Chemicals of Vancouver (where millions of tons of the stuff gets stored and handled), detailed just how complex a challenge reducing the environmental impact of fugitive sulphur fines can be. The stuff even volatilises from the surface of the stockpile when the sun shines on it. Tariq Cheema of Syncrude and Paul Davis of Alberta Sulphur Research Ltd. reported on recent very detailed studies of just how unsold and stockpiled elemental sulphur behaves as it sits waiting for end users to show up and haul it away. How does it shrink, crack and fail structurally? Does it acidify, and how fast under what conditions? How important is aerobic oxygen access and what role does moisture play? What role does percolation play and can cover affect this? Does burial help and what are the results of real life, full-sized tests of surface and buried block storage? And what about the hydrogen sulphide that it can evolve in storage, asked Mike Shields of ASRL, when it wasn’t “de-gassed” up front? Who said sulphur was just another bulk solid product to handle? That attitude is probably one of the main reasons for its current bad reputation.
The solution to much of the foregoing challenge is to find new markets for the old yellow element. It is not that the ideas and even the basic R&D has not been done; Shell Canada’s extensive and ongoing work on their Thiopave formulation for roadway surfacing was described by Timo Makinen. Gerry D’Aquin of Con-Sul reviewed and commented on some earlier ASRL work on a very convenient local use of both oil sands tailings and elemental sulphur for temporary mine site paving: An environmentally beneficial improvement to mining operations and an opportunity to save on haulage truck fuel costs due to reduction in frictional drag losses in the wet/mud seasons.
The essence of a good, productive day-long session on a focused topic is the discussion that it generates. Larry Marks, previously of Shell, joined Jim Hyne, Paul Davis and Gerry D’Aquin as the “provocateurs” in an hour long discussion of both the ideas from the papers and additional matters relevant to the future of recovered elemental sulphur. It was perhaps a pity that the audience did not include many of those in the Heavy Oil Patch that produce the stuff in the first place so that they can make money from the ‘in demand’ desulphurised fuel. We continue to try, but the way is long and the hill is steep!
'Thiophilos'
PennWell’s third annual Oil Sands and Heavy Oils Technology (OSHOT) conference showed up on schedule in Calgary in July, in the midst of more media madness on the topic of the environmental impact resulting from society’s continuing love affair with energy from converting the energy which Mother Nature (over many millions of years) put in the carbon-hydrogen bond into the energy needed to drive its ever more luxurious life style – for some.
It is hardly surprising that the sulphur recovered from the world’s second largest hydrocarbon reserve - in Alberta - (notwithstanding Colonel Hugo’s recent claims for Orinoco) was again featured in a whole day session on the yellow element. It is recovered during the upgrading and refining of a present 1.5 million bbl/d of daily oil sands bitumen production that is predicted to reach 3.5 million bbl/d by 2025. At a near 5% sulphur content this could mean over 9 million t/a of the yellow element from Alberta’s oil sand production alone. And all of this in the face of rising world wide production from sourer conventional hydrocarbon production and possible competition for its use in fertilizer manufacture. All of these factors popped up somewhere, somehow in the presentations and active and full discussion session that followed.
If there was one message that emerged from the day long dialogue on dirty sulphur from dirty oilsand it was the harder sulphur tries the more bad press it attracts. We try to please all and end up satisfying none. With sea floor oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, and US congressmen calling for Americans (the world’s most extravagant users of the stuff) to strike Alberta off its “to visit” list until the oil sands production (which goes mostly to them!!) is stopped, it is indeed a hard task to respond responsibly to the demands for less emissions and more production. But, notwithstanding the mood of the media and by extension the people their readers, the industry keeps on trying, regretfully without too much public relations success.
The rigor of regulation, and the resulting hoops that must be jumped through in the process of design and operation of facilities to handle the recovered sulphur, was reviewed and commented on by Rob Mann of Alberta Sulphur Terminals (Hazco). The harder you try, the longer it takes, and it is not for the faint of heart was the message. While doing all of this handling, storage and transportation, Glenn Weagle of IPAC Chemicals of Vancouver (where millions of tons of the stuff gets stored and handled), detailed just how complex a challenge reducing the environmental impact of fugitive sulphur fines can be. The stuff even volatilises from the surface of the stockpile when the sun shines on it. Tariq Cheema of Syncrude and Paul Davis of Alberta Sulphur Research Ltd. reported on recent very detailed studies of just how unsold and stockpiled elemental sulphur behaves as it sits waiting for end users to show up and haul it away. How does it shrink, crack and fail structurally? Does it acidify, and how fast under what conditions? How important is aerobic oxygen access and what role does moisture play? What role does percolation play and can cover affect this? Does burial help and what are the results of real life, full-sized tests of surface and buried block storage? And what about the hydrogen sulphide that it can evolve in storage, asked Mike Shields of ASRL, when it wasn’t “de-gassed” up front? Who said sulphur was just another bulk solid product to handle? That attitude is probably one of the main reasons for its current bad reputation.
The solution to much of the foregoing challenge is to find new markets for the old yellow element. It is not that the ideas and even the basic R&D has not been done; Shell Canada’s extensive and ongoing work on their Thiopave formulation for roadway surfacing was described by Timo Makinen. Gerry D’Aquin of Con-Sul reviewed and commented on some earlier ASRL work on a very convenient local use of both oil sands tailings and elemental sulphur for temporary mine site paving: An environmentally beneficial improvement to mining operations and an opportunity to save on haulage truck fuel costs due to reduction in frictional drag losses in the wet/mud seasons.
The essence of a good, productive day-long session on a focused topic is the discussion that it generates. Larry Marks, previously of Shell, joined Jim Hyne, Paul Davis and Gerry D’Aquin as the “provocateurs” in an hour long discussion of both the ideas from the papers and additional matters relevant to the future of recovered elemental sulphur. It was perhaps a pity that the audience did not include many of those in the Heavy Oil Patch that produce the stuff in the first place so that they can make money from the ‘in demand’ desulphurised fuel. We continue to try, but the way is long and the hill is steep!
'Thiophilos'
Friday 16 July 2010
Have you looked at your thio-liability lately?
[By our guest columnist, 'Thiophilos']
The bright yellow element that many of Sulphur’s readers produce, trade, use or are otherwise involved in is as safe a commodity as many. Certainly it burns, but so does good wood that supports the green canopies of our forests that absorb nasty carbon dioxide. Certainly it corrodes, but so does salt sea water that comprises the essential seas and oceans of our watery planet. It can be made to explode, but it needs to be finely divided like the flour that we use to make the bread we eat to survive. So by many measures it is a relatively safe commodity that should not generate unusual exposure to liability for direct damages.
But, in this day and age of maximization of retribution for damages suffered, it is arguably unwise for the Loss Prevention Office of any organisation to be lax in attention to the details of prevention of and protection against liability incurred in corporate involvement with even safe elemental sulphur - directly or indirectly! It is this indirect and often less obvious liability linkage that should be the focus of the Loss Prevention Office and/or liability protection exercise.
While elemental sulphur may be a relatively benign material it is closely related to two very unpleasant, hazardous and toxic products into which it can be easily converted.
Hydrogen sulphide <-(reduction)- elemental sulphur –(oxidation)-> sulphur dioxide
Since the main source of commercial elemental sulphur has become its recovery from petroleum via reduction to hydrogen sulphide and then oxidation to elemental sulphur (via the Claus process), the presence of residues of toxic hydrogen sulphide in the product sulphur has become commonplace. Hence the need for so called ‘de-gassing’ of petroleum sourced sulphur to reduce (but not necessarily eliminate) the creation of fugitive hydrogen sulphide from bulk sulphur, especially in its liquid form. If this happens when the bulk sulphur is enclosed in a container, generation of toxic levels of hydrogen sulphide create a liability hazard that can have very expensive consequences – even if they are not lethal. A tankful of rotten eggs can generate a very good argument for an aggressive counsellor! And sometimes the hydrogen sulphide in the liquid sulphur can be ‘hiding’ there, chemically combined with the host sulphur in the form of hydrogen polysulphide. If it stayed that way it would be relatively non-toxic. But it doesn’t. The polysulfide slowly decomposes back to sulphur and hydrogen sulphide which is release to atmosphere as a fugitive toxic emission when it is least expected. Check that your sulphur has been thoroughly degassed. It may be an indirect consequence but it can prevent a lot of expensive liability.
Sulphur burns. Indeed its common name of ‘brimstone’ is a corruption of the old form ‘bremstane’ or the “burning stone”. While the sulphur flame is a ‘cool’ one and unlikely to cause much flame damage, it is hot enough to melt the solid sulphur in to its liquid state. When that liquid sulphur re-solidifies on human skin at 120C it stays in place and scalds at temperatures hotter than boiling water, and retains the heat due to its low thermal conductivity. Gruesome is a kind word to describe the result. Another example of indirect but no less potent liability.
The direct combustion of sulphur needs oxygen. The more readily oxygen is available the faster the oxidation. The faster the oxidation the more explosive the reaction. Not a direct linkage between cause and effect but a chain of circumstances that all adds up to a liability. Have you checked sources of oxygen around your sulphur?
An even more indirect liability of the burning of elemental sulphur is the toxic nature of the resulting sulphur dioxide combustion product. Its high toxicity is different from that of hydrogen sulphide but it is no less lethal. The oxidation that happens when elemental sulphur burns in air yields sulphur dioxide and it, in turn, creates acidic conditions that effect human airways and plant tissue and corrodes metals. These properties then become the basis for indirect but effective environmental impact. How many supposed liability insurance cover against Errors and Omissions carry clauses that invalidate the protection if changes in emissions are involved? Even if you think you have protection, think again. The wording can be crucial!
So, all of you dealers in the “stone that burns” - have you done a recent inventory of your “thio-liability” and your protection against it? The financial officer regularly reviews the corporate budget balance. The safety office regularly reviews the health and safety practices. Operations maintains close supervision of the production equipment. It is good policy to keep a close eye on the “thio-liability” balance of all sulphur operations, especially the indirect ones. These are the ones most likely to trip up the unwary. It can be an expensive fall.
‘Thiophilos’
The bright yellow element that many of Sulphur’s readers produce, trade, use or are otherwise involved in is as safe a commodity as many. Certainly it burns, but so does good wood that supports the green canopies of our forests that absorb nasty carbon dioxide. Certainly it corrodes, but so does salt sea water that comprises the essential seas and oceans of our watery planet. It can be made to explode, but it needs to be finely divided like the flour that we use to make the bread we eat to survive. So by many measures it is a relatively safe commodity that should not generate unusual exposure to liability for direct damages.
But, in this day and age of maximization of retribution for damages suffered, it is arguably unwise for the Loss Prevention Office of any organisation to be lax in attention to the details of prevention of and protection against liability incurred in corporate involvement with even safe elemental sulphur - directly or indirectly! It is this indirect and often less obvious liability linkage that should be the focus of the Loss Prevention Office and/or liability protection exercise.
While elemental sulphur may be a relatively benign material it is closely related to two very unpleasant, hazardous and toxic products into which it can be easily converted.
Hydrogen sulphide <-(reduction)- elemental sulphur –(oxidation)-> sulphur dioxide
Since the main source of commercial elemental sulphur has become its recovery from petroleum via reduction to hydrogen sulphide and then oxidation to elemental sulphur (via the Claus process), the presence of residues of toxic hydrogen sulphide in the product sulphur has become commonplace. Hence the need for so called ‘de-gassing’ of petroleum sourced sulphur to reduce (but not necessarily eliminate) the creation of fugitive hydrogen sulphide from bulk sulphur, especially in its liquid form. If this happens when the bulk sulphur is enclosed in a container, generation of toxic levels of hydrogen sulphide create a liability hazard that can have very expensive consequences – even if they are not lethal. A tankful of rotten eggs can generate a very good argument for an aggressive counsellor! And sometimes the hydrogen sulphide in the liquid sulphur can be ‘hiding’ there, chemically combined with the host sulphur in the form of hydrogen polysulphide. If it stayed that way it would be relatively non-toxic. But it doesn’t. The polysulfide slowly decomposes back to sulphur and hydrogen sulphide which is release to atmosphere as a fugitive toxic emission when it is least expected. Check that your sulphur has been thoroughly degassed. It may be an indirect consequence but it can prevent a lot of expensive liability.
Sulphur burns. Indeed its common name of ‘brimstone’ is a corruption of the old form ‘bremstane’ or the “burning stone”. While the sulphur flame is a ‘cool’ one and unlikely to cause much flame damage, it is hot enough to melt the solid sulphur in to its liquid state. When that liquid sulphur re-solidifies on human skin at 120C it stays in place and scalds at temperatures hotter than boiling water, and retains the heat due to its low thermal conductivity. Gruesome is a kind word to describe the result. Another example of indirect but no less potent liability.
The direct combustion of sulphur needs oxygen. The more readily oxygen is available the faster the oxidation. The faster the oxidation the more explosive the reaction. Not a direct linkage between cause and effect but a chain of circumstances that all adds up to a liability. Have you checked sources of oxygen around your sulphur?
An even more indirect liability of the burning of elemental sulphur is the toxic nature of the resulting sulphur dioxide combustion product. Its high toxicity is different from that of hydrogen sulphide but it is no less lethal. The oxidation that happens when elemental sulphur burns in air yields sulphur dioxide and it, in turn, creates acidic conditions that effect human airways and plant tissue and corrodes metals. These properties then become the basis for indirect but effective environmental impact. How many supposed liability insurance cover against Errors and Omissions carry clauses that invalidate the protection if changes in emissions are involved? Even if you think you have protection, think again. The wording can be crucial!
So, all of you dealers in the “stone that burns” - have you done a recent inventory of your “thio-liability” and your protection against it? The financial officer regularly reviews the corporate budget balance. The safety office regularly reviews the health and safety practices. Operations maintains close supervision of the production equipment. It is good policy to keep a close eye on the “thio-liability” balance of all sulphur operations, especially the indirect ones. These are the ones most likely to trip up the unwary. It can be an expensive fall.
‘Thiophilos’
Murky waters
The fallout from the fatal explosion on board the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20th has not been limited to eleven lives lost and a sea full of oil. President Obama and Anglo-American oil giant BP are both fighting for their lives, and the future of deep water drilling itself is now seriously under question. Although a Louisiana court has ruled that Obama’s 6-month moratorium on offshore deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is illegal, the White House is appealing the decision. Meanwhile the European Union is now placing deep water drilling in the North Sea under intense scrutiny, and Canada is looking again at the drilling planned of its eastern seaboard. In Brazil, the Petrobras flotation has been delayed. Even OPEC has weighed into the debate, with its secretary general Abdullah al-Badri pleading with EU energy ministers not to “jump to conclusions” and urging the US to “look again” at its ban on offshore drilling.
The offshore oil and gas industry generally has a good safety record. But it can only take one accident to change things forever, especially when that accident is now America’s worst environmental disaster, with anywhere between 20 – 40 million barrels of oil released, and no end in sight before August at the earliest, even with hurricanes permitting. By comparison, the Exxon Valdez spilled ‘only’ 11 million barrels.
However, where this particular decision goes is of crucial importance to all of us, because the bald truth is; deep water is where a lot of the remaining oil is. Peter Vosser, CEO of Royal Dutch/Shell said as much at a conference in South Africa recently, and other oil companies have been lining up to say the same thing. This has led many analysts to assume that pressure from the oil lobby will ultimately win out in corridors of power around the world. In spite of the disaster, Libya has granted BP the right to drill offshore, with the head of the country’s National Oil Company commenting: “you do not ban flying because of one crash”. Well, no, but then again, most air crashes don’t demolish livelihoods across a huge swathe of a major nation and wipe half the value off the world’s third largest oil company. That kind of level of risk is enough to give insurers nightmares and might make even the largest oil majors think twice about the potential downsides. At the very least, regulation and safety concerns are likely to push up costs and push out completion dates. In a world where we may be approaching Peak Oil production, this can have a major effect on oil prices.
But there are more fundamental questions at stake here for the oil and gas industry. BP’s own annual Statistical Review of World Energy, published earlier in June, shows proved global oil reserves of 1.3 trillion barrels; about 45 years at current consumption rates. But it does not show how much of it is in difficult areas; difficult politically, or difficult technically. Deep water, small fields with complex geology, highly sour, maybe shales or oil sands with environmental risks attached… the job of being an oil producer is getting ever more difficult, more complex, and more expensive.
For Big Oil this has actually been a plus point; their technology and expertise therefore remain a marketable commodity even after national oil companies in the developing world have gained sufficient expertise to conduct ordinary operations by themselves. But as the Deepwater Horizon disaster has shown, it also lays them open to much bigger risks. No more is this so than where it comes to handling some of the corollaries of the sourer and more challenging oil and gas fields that are under development, namely sulphur and its compounds. A blowout at a sour gas well could potentially have even more catastrophic consequences than one 10,000 feet below sea level. Thiophilos’ comments in this issue’s Last Words are especially pertinent to this: everyone needs to consider their thio-liability these days.
The offshore oil and gas industry generally has a good safety record. But it can only take one accident to change things forever, especially when that accident is now America’s worst environmental disaster, with anywhere between 20 – 40 million barrels of oil released, and no end in sight before August at the earliest, even with hurricanes permitting. By comparison, the Exxon Valdez spilled ‘only’ 11 million barrels.
However, where this particular decision goes is of crucial importance to all of us, because the bald truth is; deep water is where a lot of the remaining oil is. Peter Vosser, CEO of Royal Dutch/Shell said as much at a conference in South Africa recently, and other oil companies have been lining up to say the same thing. This has led many analysts to assume that pressure from the oil lobby will ultimately win out in corridors of power around the world. In spite of the disaster, Libya has granted BP the right to drill offshore, with the head of the country’s National Oil Company commenting: “you do not ban flying because of one crash”. Well, no, but then again, most air crashes don’t demolish livelihoods across a huge swathe of a major nation and wipe half the value off the world’s third largest oil company. That kind of level of risk is enough to give insurers nightmares and might make even the largest oil majors think twice about the potential downsides. At the very least, regulation and safety concerns are likely to push up costs and push out completion dates. In a world where we may be approaching Peak Oil production, this can have a major effect on oil prices.
But there are more fundamental questions at stake here for the oil and gas industry. BP’s own annual Statistical Review of World Energy, published earlier in June, shows proved global oil reserves of 1.3 trillion barrels; about 45 years at current consumption rates. But it does not show how much of it is in difficult areas; difficult politically, or difficult technically. Deep water, small fields with complex geology, highly sour, maybe shales or oil sands with environmental risks attached… the job of being an oil producer is getting ever more difficult, more complex, and more expensive.
For Big Oil this has actually been a plus point; their technology and expertise therefore remain a marketable commodity even after national oil companies in the developing world have gained sufficient expertise to conduct ordinary operations by themselves. But as the Deepwater Horizon disaster has shown, it also lays them open to much bigger risks. No more is this so than where it comes to handling some of the corollaries of the sourer and more challenging oil and gas fields that are under development, namely sulphur and its compounds. A blowout at a sour gas well could potentially have even more catastrophic consequences than one 10,000 feet below sea level. Thiophilos’ comments in this issue’s Last Words are especially pertinent to this: everyone needs to consider their thio-liability these days.
Friday 4 June 2010
Sulphur - oversupplied or underutilised ?
[By our guest columnist - 'Thiophilos']
Whichever it may be it is not good for the market going forward. On the supply side the numbers that keep coming in – and they have been coming in now for some time – leave little doubt that there will be a plentiful production of the stuff. Tens of millions more tons from one desert region or another. Increased recovery from higher sulphur-containing heavy crudes from both the northern and southern halves of the western hemisphere. Even the big buyers of the yellow element such as China are starting up their own domestic production to compete with and rationalise the import business essential to their feeding their billions. Is this a reflection of their having had enough of the uncertainty of both availability and price? We may never know the real answer but we have certainly seen the commercial consequences in recent times.
If the oversupply becomes too much to handle, maybe the “dig a hole and bury it” response is not such a trite idea. Then when we get smart enough to find new, productive, environmentally-friendly and profit-making really big tonnage uses for the stuff, we can recover it from the hole with good old Frasch-type mining techniques and all will be well again. Is the inventive enquiring spirit of today so lacking that we consider it prudent to bury a 99.9% pure chemical element until our brains and entrepreneurial spirit catch up with current reality?
It is a sad fact that in this day and age of inventiveness the Developers have failed to keep pace with the Researchers in the R & D business. Few want to take the risk and put the cash on the line to convert the truly huge body of quarter century-old research evidence for new uses for sulphur in new products, even when some of these new products are as green as Paddy’s flag.
Take sulphur concrete as an example. This is a material that could replace a significant proportion of the Portland cement concrete made worldwide that may be the source of as much as eight percent of all of the anthropogenic carbon dioxide we humans poop out to atmosphere annually. This is the greenhouse gas that heating limestone and driving off its carbon dioxide to make the cement generates, and which sulphur cement would not only avoid but do so in a way that keeps the sulphur from ‘leaking’ into the environment. It’s not a viable commercial option at $600/ton for sulphur, but let’s not get started again on the factors that control that aspect of the market equation. Two environmental plusses for what could and should be the price of one. And still no eager takers!
The challenge is far from new. Read the list of contents of the First International Sulphur Conference held in Calgary, Canada in 1981. Many ‘new use’ ideas were already in the pipeline and ready for full scale testing. How many of these ideas have, in the interim, seen real investment in their development? Not none, that is true. But has the investment and development been commensurate with either keeping supply/demand in balance or maximising our efforts to protect the environment from our human proclivity to screw it up?
Four lane highways to the Arctic. The Trans-Siberian Autopista. A four-laner through Timbuktu linking Southern Africa to the Mediterranean, using desert sand no less as the sulphur cement aggregate to bring enhanced prosperity to a part of the world that will not bear its present burden of want forever.
Maybe Colonel Chavez could take his sulphur from the Orinoco Heavies and build a sulphur concrete and sulphur asphalt Mercosur Motorway across the Orinoco and Amazon valleys. Their natural virginity has already been lost!
Where is the imagination and the courage to innovate that was supposed to characterize the post WWII generations? Where is the will to shake off the love affair with the “I’m all right jack; somebody else will take care of the challenges”? It is a sad day when society pours in billions to sequester its most recently identified environmental pollutant carbon dioxide but cannot find new uses for one that Rachel Carson fingered half a century ago: and in ways that might well be linked to solutions to the carbon dioxide challenge.
Wake up World; it’s not too late. The yellow element may well have a new role to play in the Brave New World but it will not escape the indignity of being buried in a hole in the ground and being manipulated in the bartering back rooms of the international market place because it doesn’t have big profit signs written all over it.
‘Thiophilos’
Whichever it may be it is not good for the market going forward. On the supply side the numbers that keep coming in – and they have been coming in now for some time – leave little doubt that there will be a plentiful production of the stuff. Tens of millions more tons from one desert region or another. Increased recovery from higher sulphur-containing heavy crudes from both the northern and southern halves of the western hemisphere. Even the big buyers of the yellow element such as China are starting up their own domestic production to compete with and rationalise the import business essential to their feeding their billions. Is this a reflection of their having had enough of the uncertainty of both availability and price? We may never know the real answer but we have certainly seen the commercial consequences in recent times.
If the oversupply becomes too much to handle, maybe the “dig a hole and bury it” response is not such a trite idea. Then when we get smart enough to find new, productive, environmentally-friendly and profit-making really big tonnage uses for the stuff, we can recover it from the hole with good old Frasch-type mining techniques and all will be well again. Is the inventive enquiring spirit of today so lacking that we consider it prudent to bury a 99.9% pure chemical element until our brains and entrepreneurial spirit catch up with current reality?
It is a sad fact that in this day and age of inventiveness the Developers have failed to keep pace with the Researchers in the R & D business. Few want to take the risk and put the cash on the line to convert the truly huge body of quarter century-old research evidence for new uses for sulphur in new products, even when some of these new products are as green as Paddy’s flag.
Take sulphur concrete as an example. This is a material that could replace a significant proportion of the Portland cement concrete made worldwide that may be the source of as much as eight percent of all of the anthropogenic carbon dioxide we humans poop out to atmosphere annually. This is the greenhouse gas that heating limestone and driving off its carbon dioxide to make the cement generates, and which sulphur cement would not only avoid but do so in a way that keeps the sulphur from ‘leaking’ into the environment. It’s not a viable commercial option at $600/ton for sulphur, but let’s not get started again on the factors that control that aspect of the market equation. Two environmental plusses for what could and should be the price of one. And still no eager takers!
The challenge is far from new. Read the list of contents of the First International Sulphur Conference held in Calgary, Canada in 1981. Many ‘new use’ ideas were already in the pipeline and ready for full scale testing. How many of these ideas have, in the interim, seen real investment in their development? Not none, that is true. But has the investment and development been commensurate with either keeping supply/demand in balance or maximising our efforts to protect the environment from our human proclivity to screw it up?
Four lane highways to the Arctic. The Trans-Siberian Autopista. A four-laner through Timbuktu linking Southern Africa to the Mediterranean, using desert sand no less as the sulphur cement aggregate to bring enhanced prosperity to a part of the world that will not bear its present burden of want forever.
Maybe Colonel Chavez could take his sulphur from the Orinoco Heavies and build a sulphur concrete and sulphur asphalt Mercosur Motorway across the Orinoco and Amazon valleys. Their natural virginity has already been lost!
Where is the imagination and the courage to innovate that was supposed to characterize the post WWII generations? Where is the will to shake off the love affair with the “I’m all right jack; somebody else will take care of the challenges”? It is a sad day when society pours in billions to sequester its most recently identified environmental pollutant carbon dioxide but cannot find new uses for one that Rachel Carson fingered half a century ago: and in ways that might well be linked to solutions to the carbon dioxide challenge.
Wake up World; it’s not too late. The yellow element may well have a new role to play in the Brave New World but it will not escape the indignity of being buried in a hole in the ground and being manipulated in the bartering back rooms of the international market place because it doesn’t have big profit signs written all over it.
‘Thiophilos’
Thursday 3 June 2010
Unintended consequences
This is not the first time that this column has turned to the subject of the new International Maritime Organization (IMO) regulations on sulphur dioxide emissions from shipping and sulphur levels in bunker fuels, and it will probably not be the last, but a report published towards the end of last year by the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo (CICERO) has drawn attention to yet another paradox of our continuing obsession with sulphur-based emissions – the new regulations will increase global warming, and probably by a considerable amount.
The new IMO regulations, the first section of which will come into force in July, will cut the maximum sulphur content of shipping fuel to 3.5% in 2012 and 0.5 % by 2020. Special sulphur emission control areas (ECAs) around the coastlines of North America and in the Baltic and North seas have to achieve lower limits of 1% from this July and 0.1% by 2015. The shipping industry has been the last to face lower sulphur fuels – road transport and aviation already have regulations covering them. Indeed, sulphur levels in road fuels are down to parts per million in most of the major consuming regions, while in bunker fuels they are still at around 3 - 4%. As a result just a dozen or two large container ships can emit as much sulphur dioxide in a year as all of the developed world’s cars put together.
The aim of the IMO regulations will eventually – it is hoped – be a reduction in sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions of up to 90%, and with them the resulting haze of sulphate particles that the SO2 is a precursor to. These particulates are known to cause lung and heart disease when they reach shore, and have been calculated to cause as many as 64,000 additional deaths worldwide every year, around 27,000 of them in Europe.
However, the particulates also reflect sunlight back into space, helping to partially mask the warming effects of greenhouses gases. Indeed, Nobel chemistry laureate Paul Crutzen has actually suggested that burning sulphur to produce sulphur dioxide in certain regions could actually be a way of mitigating global warming by ‘geoengineering’. At the moment, the cooling effect of SO2 emissions from ships actually far outweigh the warming effect of their CO2 emissions. Jan Fuglestvedt of CICERO has calculated that the net effect of the warming and cooling influences of ship emissions is that shipping currently neutralises about 7% of human-produced global warming. The removal of 90% of this sulphur over the next decade or so will thus serve to actually increase the effects of global warming by 6% or more.
A further complicating factor is that the impacts of the effects of CO2 and SO2 emissions are felt on very different timescales. The climatic effect of emissions from a ship at sea is initially dominated by the strong cooling influence of the SO2. As well as providing a direct shading effect, sulphate particles also act as nuclei around which water droplets form, making skies cloudier. However, this effect only lasts for a few days, until the ocean absorbs the SO2, and if it were not constantly being replenished, the warming effect of the ships' CO2 emissions would instead dominate, and continue to last for many decades.
Carbon dioxide emissions from shipping were left out of the 1997 Kyoto protocol because it is a complex issue. The IMO has long been planning action on CO2 emissions from ships – which represent around 3% of global emissions – but the need for coordinated international action means that this has been in abeyance since the failure of climate talks in Copenhagen in December. The issue of flags of convenience is a particularly vexed one, as two-thirds of the world's ships are registered in small non-industrial countries such as Panama and the Bahamas which do not have national CO2 emission targets. Treating the shipping industry separately from national targets would be possible, with its own emission ceiling, but developing countries argue that this spreads the burden unfairly between the developing and developed world. Still, there is huge potential to cut CO2 emissions from shipping. The Danish shipping line Maersk claimed earlier in the year that by making its container ships travel more slowly it had cut their fuel use, and hence carbon emissions, by 30%. Better designed engines, hulls and propellers could cut CO2 emissions by a further 15-20%.
It seems paradoxical to say the least that the IMO is able to make progress on cutting SO2 emissions and not CO2 emissions, in spite of the serious global difficulties that will ensue.
The new IMO regulations, the first section of which will come into force in July, will cut the maximum sulphur content of shipping fuel to 3.5% in 2012 and 0.5 % by 2020. Special sulphur emission control areas (ECAs) around the coastlines of North America and in the Baltic and North seas have to achieve lower limits of 1% from this July and 0.1% by 2015. The shipping industry has been the last to face lower sulphur fuels – road transport and aviation already have regulations covering them. Indeed, sulphur levels in road fuels are down to parts per million in most of the major consuming regions, while in bunker fuels they are still at around 3 - 4%. As a result just a dozen or two large container ships can emit as much sulphur dioxide in a year as all of the developed world’s cars put together.
The aim of the IMO regulations will eventually – it is hoped – be a reduction in sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions of up to 90%, and with them the resulting haze of sulphate particles that the SO2 is a precursor to. These particulates are known to cause lung and heart disease when they reach shore, and have been calculated to cause as many as 64,000 additional deaths worldwide every year, around 27,000 of them in Europe.
However, the particulates also reflect sunlight back into space, helping to partially mask the warming effects of greenhouses gases. Indeed, Nobel chemistry laureate Paul Crutzen has actually suggested that burning sulphur to produce sulphur dioxide in certain regions could actually be a way of mitigating global warming by ‘geoengineering’. At the moment, the cooling effect of SO2 emissions from ships actually far outweigh the warming effect of their CO2 emissions. Jan Fuglestvedt of CICERO has calculated that the net effect of the warming and cooling influences of ship emissions is that shipping currently neutralises about 7% of human-produced global warming. The removal of 90% of this sulphur over the next decade or so will thus serve to actually increase the effects of global warming by 6% or more.
A further complicating factor is that the impacts of the effects of CO2 and SO2 emissions are felt on very different timescales. The climatic effect of emissions from a ship at sea is initially dominated by the strong cooling influence of the SO2. As well as providing a direct shading effect, sulphate particles also act as nuclei around which water droplets form, making skies cloudier. However, this effect only lasts for a few days, until the ocean absorbs the SO2, and if it were not constantly being replenished, the warming effect of the ships' CO2 emissions would instead dominate, and continue to last for many decades.
Carbon dioxide emissions from shipping were left out of the 1997 Kyoto protocol because it is a complex issue. The IMO has long been planning action on CO2 emissions from ships – which represent around 3% of global emissions – but the need for coordinated international action means that this has been in abeyance since the failure of climate talks in Copenhagen in December. The issue of flags of convenience is a particularly vexed one, as two-thirds of the world's ships are registered in small non-industrial countries such as Panama and the Bahamas which do not have national CO2 emission targets. Treating the shipping industry separately from national targets would be possible, with its own emission ceiling, but developing countries argue that this spreads the burden unfairly between the developing and developed world. Still, there is huge potential to cut CO2 emissions from shipping. The Danish shipping line Maersk claimed earlier in the year that by making its container ships travel more slowly it had cut their fuel use, and hence carbon emissions, by 30%. Better designed engines, hulls and propellers could cut CO2 emissions by a further 15-20%.
It seems paradoxical to say the least that the IMO is able to make progress on cutting SO2 emissions and not CO2 emissions, in spite of the serious global difficulties that will ensue.
Thursday 18 March 2010
Sulphur wins nutrient battle
On February 18th the Indian cabinet approved a historic decision to change the country’s system of fertilizer subsidies. From April 1st this year, India will pay a per tonne nutrient-based subsidy on price-decontrolled fertilizers. This affects all of the major fertilizers used in India; mono- and di-ammonium phosphate, urea, triple superphosphate, ammonium sulphate, potassium chloride (‘MOP’), and 12 grades of NPK complex fertilizers. Interestingly, for the first time sulphur is considered to be a primary nutrient and will be subsidised accordingly - the first time that it has ever achieved such formal recognition.
The move aims to correct serious issues with the present system. During the 1960s and 70s, India underwent its so-called ‘green revolution’, when yields from rice and other food production tripled. In the second half of the 20th century India went from being a country that had imported food aid from the United States to being self-sufficient in agriculture even during a time when its population ballooned from 450 million to its present 1.2 billion. India’s agricultural self-sufficiency was in no small part driven by a system of fertilizer subsidy that made fertilizers cheap enough for farmers to afford them. Rather than give the money to farmers, the subsidy system instead paid fertilizer producers to supply them at a certain price, building in a minimum return on investment. As a result, there was a massive boom in production of fertilizers, particularly ammonia and urea.
Unfortunately the plan became a victim of its own success. The bill for subsidy kept climbing, from $640 million to $20 billion, at which point it was starting to consume a major part of Indian government revenues. The problem was that the plants had been built on whatever feedstock was available; some of them based on natural gas, but most on naphtha from oil refining. By the 1990s prices for both were high in India as the fertilizer industry had to compete with other users, in particular natural gas for power production.
India’s shortage of domestic phosphate and potash meant that it also had to import those, often at considerable expense but the subsidy scheme remained skewed towards nitrogen production, particularly urea, and prices for phosphorus and potash were higher. The upshot was that farmers used urea preferentially, as it was cheap, only buying in other fertilizers when they had spare income. Thus while crops were receiving enough nitrogen, soils rapidly became depleted in the other key nutrients. Last year, it is reckoned that some parts of India were applying nitrogen to potassium in a ratio of 32:1 rather than the recommended 4:1. In particular, as has happened in China, use of sulphur-containing fertilizers like TSP and ammonium sulphate fell at the expense of ammonium phosphates. The result was a gradual and accelerating depletion of sulphur in soils. The cumulative effect of all this on soils and consequently on crops was predictable. Farming yields were beginning to fall even as the subsidy bill continued to climb astronomically. The system was clearly broken, and the record high prices of 2007-8 brought matters to a head. The government simply could not afford to continue subsidies in the same manner in future, and it needed to find a way to fix soil nutrient ratios if it was going to continue to feed a population that is still growing and projected to reach 1.7 billion by the time it stabilises, some time around 2060.
The new nutrient-based subsidy scheme is still a compromise. Urea prices are still not decontrolled, although the government is to allow prices to rise without increasing the subsidy, and the few remaining naphtha-based urea producers will have two years to convert to natural gas production before their own preferential subsidies are axed. However, in theory, the new system should boost not only phosphate fertilizer consumption, but also sulphate fertilizer use; not only a way of rescuing soil fertility and crop yields in India, but also a double boost for the sulphur industry in one of the largest markets for fertilizer in the world.
And India is far from the only country that is having to deal with such problems of nutrient imbalance and falling agricultural yields at a time when its population is rising. It is an endemic problem all over Asia, including in China. If the new scheme is successful, we may be at the beginnings of a new boost to phosphate and sulphate fertilizer consumption elsewhere, with concomitant demand for sulphuric acid and hence for sulphur. While some of the other projected uses for the massive sulphur surplus we face over the next few years are only for small tonnages, according to IFA the total tonnage of fertilizer nutrient applied around the world is 900 million tonnes for N, P and K combined. If sulphate and phosphate application increased by only a few percentage points, that could still represent millions of tonnes of additional demand.
The move aims to correct serious issues with the present system. During the 1960s and 70s, India underwent its so-called ‘green revolution’, when yields from rice and other food production tripled. In the second half of the 20th century India went from being a country that had imported food aid from the United States to being self-sufficient in agriculture even during a time when its population ballooned from 450 million to its present 1.2 billion. India’s agricultural self-sufficiency was in no small part driven by a system of fertilizer subsidy that made fertilizers cheap enough for farmers to afford them. Rather than give the money to farmers, the subsidy system instead paid fertilizer producers to supply them at a certain price, building in a minimum return on investment. As a result, there was a massive boom in production of fertilizers, particularly ammonia and urea.
Unfortunately the plan became a victim of its own success. The bill for subsidy kept climbing, from $640 million to $20 billion, at which point it was starting to consume a major part of Indian government revenues. The problem was that the plants had been built on whatever feedstock was available; some of them based on natural gas, but most on naphtha from oil refining. By the 1990s prices for both were high in India as the fertilizer industry had to compete with other users, in particular natural gas for power production.
India’s shortage of domestic phosphate and potash meant that it also had to import those, often at considerable expense but the subsidy scheme remained skewed towards nitrogen production, particularly urea, and prices for phosphorus and potash were higher. The upshot was that farmers used urea preferentially, as it was cheap, only buying in other fertilizers when they had spare income. Thus while crops were receiving enough nitrogen, soils rapidly became depleted in the other key nutrients. Last year, it is reckoned that some parts of India were applying nitrogen to potassium in a ratio of 32:1 rather than the recommended 4:1. In particular, as has happened in China, use of sulphur-containing fertilizers like TSP and ammonium sulphate fell at the expense of ammonium phosphates. The result was a gradual and accelerating depletion of sulphur in soils. The cumulative effect of all this on soils and consequently on crops was predictable. Farming yields were beginning to fall even as the subsidy bill continued to climb astronomically. The system was clearly broken, and the record high prices of 2007-8 brought matters to a head. The government simply could not afford to continue subsidies in the same manner in future, and it needed to find a way to fix soil nutrient ratios if it was going to continue to feed a population that is still growing and projected to reach 1.7 billion by the time it stabilises, some time around 2060.
The new nutrient-based subsidy scheme is still a compromise. Urea prices are still not decontrolled, although the government is to allow prices to rise without increasing the subsidy, and the few remaining naphtha-based urea producers will have two years to convert to natural gas production before their own preferential subsidies are axed. However, in theory, the new system should boost not only phosphate fertilizer consumption, but also sulphate fertilizer use; not only a way of rescuing soil fertility and crop yields in India, but also a double boost for the sulphur industry in one of the largest markets for fertilizer in the world.
And India is far from the only country that is having to deal with such problems of nutrient imbalance and falling agricultural yields at a time when its population is rising. It is an endemic problem all over Asia, including in China. If the new scheme is successful, we may be at the beginnings of a new boost to phosphate and sulphate fertilizer consumption elsewhere, with concomitant demand for sulphuric acid and hence for sulphur. While some of the other projected uses for the massive sulphur surplus we face over the next few years are only for small tonnages, according to IFA the total tonnage of fertilizer nutrient applied around the world is 900 million tonnes for N, P and K combined. If sulphate and phosphate application increased by only a few percentage points, that could still represent millions of tonnes of additional demand.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
