[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’
Friday 4 June 2010
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.
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