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’