In early September the Iraq Mining Conference was held in London, showcasing a series of projects for which the Iraqi government is hoping to gain foreign participation and finance. While much development in the country has previously focused on its oil, gas and petrochemical industries, Iraq also has considerable mineral resources, including iron ore, copper, gypsum, dolomite and marble. According to deputy prime minister Dr. Rowsch N. Shaways, the minerals and mining sector contributed just 6% to Iraq’s GDP in 2009 (compared to about 68% for oil, gas and refining), but has the potential to play a far more significant role, reducing dependency on the hydrocarbon sector.
Of particular interest to the sulphur industry are firstly the huge (at least 100 and possibly up to 500 million tonnes) elemental sulphur deposit at al-Mishraq, which prior to the 2003 invasion was producing over a million tonnes of sulphur per year via Frasch mining, and secondly the major phosphate deposits in the west of the country. Of these latter, Greg Fernette, from the US Geological Survey (USGS) told the conference that Iraq possesses “world class” phosphate reserves. The USGS has been working with its Iraqi counterpart Geosurv in a seven year study to map the country’s mineral reserves, and calculates that the two largest phosphate deposits, Akashat and Swab, have 1.7 and 3.5 billion tonnes of ore respectively, at >21% P2O5 content. The four largest deposits, including these two, have 5.75 billion tonnes, or 9% of the world total. The H3 deposit holds 332 million tonnes at an average 17.9% P2O5, and Ethna 218.7 million tonnes at 18.1%. Overall these figures put Iraq’s phosphate deposits at the second largest in the world, after Morocco. Given the current rush towards major phosphate projects in Morocco, Australia and Saudi Arabia, Iraq has the potential to become extremely rich from these reserves.
Prior to the invasion the phosphate mines were producing about 1.0 million tonnes of rock, with downstream phosphoric acid, triple superphosphate and ammonium phosphate capacity which averaged production of 400,000 t/a P2O5. However, the plants at Akashat, in western Iraq are currently only operating at 10% of capacity. According to Dr. Khaldoun al-Bassam, director general of the state-owned Geosurv agency, rehabilitation of the phosphoric acid plant at Akashat is the top priority for the government in the minerals sector. The downstream production site is close to two open-cast phosphate rock mines. At full production, the 1million t/a P2O5 phosphoric acid plant would have a requirement for 6 million t/a phosphate rock and 1.2 million t/a sulphur. The estimated cost of rehabilitating the Akashat facilities is $280 million: in addition to the estimated $130m cost of the phosphoric acid plant, this comprises the beneficiation unit ($30m), the 600,000 t/a TSP plant ($50m), the 280,000 t/a MAP plant ($40m) and the 655,000 t/a NPK facility ($30m). Output from the rehabilitated Akashat complex would be targeted for markets in the Indian sub-continent and elsewhere in Asia.
As for the Mishraq sulphur facility, production also remains at very low levels (possibly zero), and most sales are from remaining above ground stockpiles. The cost of re-commissioning the Mishraq sulphur facility is estimated at $110 million, returning it to a projected capacity of 820,000 t/a of sulphur. No doubt most of this would go to Akashat to feed sulphuric acid production for the phosphate project.
However, as with many things in Iraq, nothing is ever quite so simple. Just as the inking of a hydrocarbons law took long and tortuous years of argument, and the final recent approval of which this August has caused a breach with the northern Kurdish region, so a review of the country’s mining law is still awaited and its lack could prove a stumbling block for new investors. The security situation also remains very difficult in several parts of the country, and there are continuing issues with power and other infrastructure.
The government recognises the difficulty of attracting overseas investment in the current climate, and is offering a 10-year tax holiday for foreign companies, or 15 years if they work in partnership with an Iraqi company. Both the potential rewards, and the risks, are considerable.
Wednesday, 5 October 2011
Tuesday, 26 July 2011
Sulphur power
Sulphur is an amazingly versatile element, as this blog never tires of telling people. Fellow poster Thiophilos reminds people of sulphur’s virtues as a power source, utilising the heat of combustion in electricity generation, as happens daily at countless sulphur-burning sulphuric acid plants around the world.
But sulphur is now also set to make other inroads into powering our lives, this time via battery technology. As the number and capability of portable electronic devices continues to increase, our appetite for portable power sources is also growing, and at a staggering rate. Battery technology has already had several step changes over the past few decades, from lead-acid through nickel-cadmium and alkaline cells, to lithium ion batteries, which are the new workhorses of the consumer electronics industry, especially for rechargeable applications like mobile phones, tablets and laptop computers. But the need to increase energy density continues, especially if we are to move to electrically-powered vehicles.
One of the problems is with the cathode of lithium ion batteries, which in the case of lithium oxides or lithium iron phosphate might only have fraction of the specific charge capacity of the silicon or graphite anode. Over the past few years, the focus of attention has turned to sulphur as a cathode – sulphur has a very high theoretical specific capacity. As a result, and also because of the relatively lightweight elements that constitute them, lithium sulphur (Li-S) batteries can have two to four times the energy density of lithium-ion batteries, both in weight and volume terms. However, one of the problems with using sulphur is its poor conductivity, and another is that it tends to form lithium polysulphides which are soluble in the battery electrolyte. This means that the Li-S batteries’ ability to be discharged and recharged rapidly degrades away over several charging cycles.
Commercial Li-S batteries have been under development by several companies, using coated sulphur and electrolytes which minimise the dissolution of the lithium polysulphides, but in the meantime work has been under way in research institutes around the world to completely overcome the issues with Li-S batteries, and now Dr Hailiang Wang and his team at Stanford University in the US say that they may have found a way. The technique that they use is a polyethylene glycol (PEG) coating on sub-micron particles of sulphur. The PEG coating traps polysulphides and prevents them dissolving away. Nanoengineering techniques are then use to wrap the coated particles in a ‘cage’ of graphene molecules. The interaction between the carbon and sulphur renders the particles electrically conducting, and also supports them as they swell and shrink during each charging cycle.
As the paper says: “it is worth noting that the graphene-sulphur composite could be coupled with silicon-based anode materials for rechargeable batteries with significantly higher energy density than currently possible.”
There is clearly a lot of work still to be done before such a technique can be first optimised and then performed on an industrial scale. However, in the meantime the first generation of lithium-sulphur batteries are already being used in demonstration applications. One was used in the world’s longest unmanned flight, using a solar-powered aircraft which stayed aloft for 14 days in July 2010. Companies like Oxis Energy and Sion Power are racing to commercialise Li-S batteries and within a few years it may well be that your mobile phone or tablet computer, and possibly even your car, will be powered by sulphur.
But sulphur is now also set to make other inroads into powering our lives, this time via battery technology. As the number and capability of portable electronic devices continues to increase, our appetite for portable power sources is also growing, and at a staggering rate. Battery technology has already had several step changes over the past few decades, from lead-acid through nickel-cadmium and alkaline cells, to lithium ion batteries, which are the new workhorses of the consumer electronics industry, especially for rechargeable applications like mobile phones, tablets and laptop computers. But the need to increase energy density continues, especially if we are to move to electrically-powered vehicles.
One of the problems is with the cathode of lithium ion batteries, which in the case of lithium oxides or lithium iron phosphate might only have fraction of the specific charge capacity of the silicon or graphite anode. Over the past few years, the focus of attention has turned to sulphur as a cathode – sulphur has a very high theoretical specific capacity. As a result, and also because of the relatively lightweight elements that constitute them, lithium sulphur (Li-S) batteries can have two to four times the energy density of lithium-ion batteries, both in weight and volume terms. However, one of the problems with using sulphur is its poor conductivity, and another is that it tends to form lithium polysulphides which are soluble in the battery electrolyte. This means that the Li-S batteries’ ability to be discharged and recharged rapidly degrades away over several charging cycles.
Commercial Li-S batteries have been under development by several companies, using coated sulphur and electrolytes which minimise the dissolution of the lithium polysulphides, but in the meantime work has been under way in research institutes around the world to completely overcome the issues with Li-S batteries, and now Dr Hailiang Wang and his team at Stanford University in the US say that they may have found a way. The technique that they use is a polyethylene glycol (PEG) coating on sub-micron particles of sulphur. The PEG coating traps polysulphides and prevents them dissolving away. Nanoengineering techniques are then use to wrap the coated particles in a ‘cage’ of graphene molecules. The interaction between the carbon and sulphur renders the particles electrically conducting, and also supports them as they swell and shrink during each charging cycle.
As the paper says: “it is worth noting that the graphene-sulphur composite could be coupled with silicon-based anode materials for rechargeable batteries with significantly higher energy density than currently possible.”
There is clearly a lot of work still to be done before such a technique can be first optimised and then performed on an industrial scale. However, in the meantime the first generation of lithium-sulphur batteries are already being used in demonstration applications. One was used in the world’s longest unmanned flight, using a solar-powered aircraft which stayed aloft for 14 days in July 2010. Companies like Oxis Energy and Sion Power are racing to commercialise Li-S batteries and within a few years it may well be that your mobile phone or tablet computer, and possibly even your car, will be powered by sulphur.
Sulphur as an energy source
[By our guest columnist, 'Thiophilos']
The stimulus for these Last Words has been the ever present suspicion that, since the Oil Patch became the world’s major source of elemental sulphur through socially imposed requirements to get it out of oil, it has become a barely tolerable pain in the butt for its suppliers. Gone are the days when the miners, be they pick and shovel or the Frasch type, produced valued sulphur “because it was needed” not because they had to, or they couldn’t sell their oil - and that is where the money is; the sulphur product is viewed as very much an unfortunate necessity!
What seems to have missed the Oil Patch’s attention is that sulphur, like carbon, is a very important source of energy in its own right. The similarities are striking. We get energy out of sulphur (and its oil patch precursor hydrogen sulphide) by burning it just as we do hydrocarbon and coal (carbon). The product of the combustion is sulphur dioxide instead of carbon dioxide. Both of these combustion products are GHGs (green house gases - as if you didn’t know). Indeed Rachel Carson et al way back fifty years ago were well ahead of Al Gore and company in highlighting the ‘Inconvenient Truth’ of the combustion emissions from the energy recovery processes. Acid Rain came long before Global Warming but the oxidative mechanism that forms the GHGs is rooted in the same human demand – for energy.
So maybe the fact that sulphur has finished up in bed with its oil patch mate as a “dirty” commodity is not all that unusual. But let’s look at just what dirty old sulphur does for us energy-wise:
In its recovery from admixture and/or combination with the hydrocarbon of oil (and gas) it appears as hydrogen sulphide (like hydro-carbon) and is oxidised (burnt) in the Claus Process Reactor. This chemical step differs little from a methane (hydrocarbon) burning furnace and produces large quantities of high quality steam, much of which is used as a process energy source or to generate electrical energy. The parallel with hydrocarbon energy generation is clear. But in sulphur’s case we are just at the beginning of the energy production chain. The end product of sulphur’s combustion is sulphur dioxide, just as carbon/hydrocarbon produces carbon dioxide, the source of global warming. In sulphur’s case, however, we already have a “capture and sequestration” procedure in place. We make sulphuric acid from the sulphur dioxide “waste product” and that acid is one of the most widely used industrial chemicals known to humankind.
If it wasn’t for the millions of tonnes of sulphuric acid available annually for processing ‘phosrock’ ore the fertilizer industry would consume millions of kilowatts of ‘alternative energy’ (electrical) in getting the essential phosphate nutrient out of the rock and into the plant so that the essential human fuel called food would still be plentifully available. Hydrocarbon-based energy sources may have become the essential motivator for automobiles, but sulphur-based energy sources play an equally important role in providing the essential food for humans. The parallels continue!
But, say the critics, the relative amounts of commodities are vastly different. Are they really? Fifty million tonnes per annum of recovered sulphur is an appropriate round figure to use for the world sulphur trade. As recently as two years ago that sulphur touched $800/tonne on world markets. Simple arithmetic using these numbers values the overall sulphur business at forty billion dollars a year. Not a fortune in today’s marketplace, where debts in the trillions are not uncommon, but not to be sneezed at either. At $100/bbl for oil it amounts to the value of four hundred million barrels of oil, or well over a month’s supply of all the hydrocarbon energy imported by the world’s biggest user. That’s a lot of energy from dirty old sulphur.
So the old yellow element is just as deserving of some respect as the black one – coke, coal or the form with hydrogen attached – hydrocarbon. It is a significant energy source as we energy-hungry humans look for ever more of the stuff. And what is even more impressive, we have already found ways to “sequester” the emissions (of sulphur dioxide) and put them to do good additional work in fuelling ‘we the people’ by fertilising the food we eat. Can you think of a comparable end use for carbon dioxide? Soda pop might cause some undesirable burping problems!
‘Thiophilos’
The stimulus for these Last Words has been the ever present suspicion that, since the Oil Patch became the world’s major source of elemental sulphur through socially imposed requirements to get it out of oil, it has become a barely tolerable pain in the butt for its suppliers. Gone are the days when the miners, be they pick and shovel or the Frasch type, produced valued sulphur “because it was needed” not because they had to, or they couldn’t sell their oil - and that is where the money is; the sulphur product is viewed as very much an unfortunate necessity!
What seems to have missed the Oil Patch’s attention is that sulphur, like carbon, is a very important source of energy in its own right. The similarities are striking. We get energy out of sulphur (and its oil patch precursor hydrogen sulphide) by burning it just as we do hydrocarbon and coal (carbon). The product of the combustion is sulphur dioxide instead of carbon dioxide. Both of these combustion products are GHGs (green house gases - as if you didn’t know). Indeed Rachel Carson et al way back fifty years ago were well ahead of Al Gore and company in highlighting the ‘Inconvenient Truth’ of the combustion emissions from the energy recovery processes. Acid Rain came long before Global Warming but the oxidative mechanism that forms the GHGs is rooted in the same human demand – for energy.
So maybe the fact that sulphur has finished up in bed with its oil patch mate as a “dirty” commodity is not all that unusual. But let’s look at just what dirty old sulphur does for us energy-wise:
In its recovery from admixture and/or combination with the hydrocarbon of oil (and gas) it appears as hydrogen sulphide (like hydro-carbon) and is oxidised (burnt) in the Claus Process Reactor. This chemical step differs little from a methane (hydrocarbon) burning furnace and produces large quantities of high quality steam, much of which is used as a process energy source or to generate electrical energy. The parallel with hydrocarbon energy generation is clear. But in sulphur’s case we are just at the beginning of the energy production chain. The end product of sulphur’s combustion is sulphur dioxide, just as carbon/hydrocarbon produces carbon dioxide, the source of global warming. In sulphur’s case, however, we already have a “capture and sequestration” procedure in place. We make sulphuric acid from the sulphur dioxide “waste product” and that acid is one of the most widely used industrial chemicals known to humankind.
If it wasn’t for the millions of tonnes of sulphuric acid available annually for processing ‘phosrock’ ore the fertilizer industry would consume millions of kilowatts of ‘alternative energy’ (electrical) in getting the essential phosphate nutrient out of the rock and into the plant so that the essential human fuel called food would still be plentifully available. Hydrocarbon-based energy sources may have become the essential motivator for automobiles, but sulphur-based energy sources play an equally important role in providing the essential food for humans. The parallels continue!
But, say the critics, the relative amounts of commodities are vastly different. Are they really? Fifty million tonnes per annum of recovered sulphur is an appropriate round figure to use for the world sulphur trade. As recently as two years ago that sulphur touched $800/tonne on world markets. Simple arithmetic using these numbers values the overall sulphur business at forty billion dollars a year. Not a fortune in today’s marketplace, where debts in the trillions are not uncommon, but not to be sneezed at either. At $100/bbl for oil it amounts to the value of four hundred million barrels of oil, or well over a month’s supply of all the hydrocarbon energy imported by the world’s biggest user. That’s a lot of energy from dirty old sulphur.
So the old yellow element is just as deserving of some respect as the black one – coke, coal or the form with hydrogen attached – hydrocarbon. It is a significant energy source as we energy-hungry humans look for ever more of the stuff. And what is even more impressive, we have already found ways to “sequester” the emissions (of sulphur dioxide) and put them to do good additional work in fuelling ‘we the people’ by fertilising the food we eat. Can you think of a comparable end use for carbon dioxide? Soda pop might cause some undesirable burping problems!
‘Thiophilos’
Is the sulphur industry doing its environmental best?
[By our guest columnist, 'Thiophilos']
As we are daily reminded by the media and many others how dirty and polluting the lives we lead have become, it seems only fair that we pause amidst the muck for a moment and examine how much, if anything, we in the sulphur business have done to clean up the mess in, say, the last couple of generations. Not withstanding the black picture painted by the Greens, it turns out that, by and large, we have not been altogether asleep at the switch. It is more a matter that the faster the industry has become cleaner, the more the people who produce the emissions have grown larger in numbers. The result - more emissions.
In the specific case of elemental sulphur, the world’s annual production of the yellow stuff has blossomed from around 3 million t/a in 1940 to well over 50 million t/a in 2010. To be fair, that growth in sulphur is offset by a reduction in the amount of iron sulphide (pyrites) that is roasted to form sulphur dioxide; that source has been displaced by burning elemental sulphur to produce the same gas to feed sulphuric acid plants. But it is still a huge increase, and one that was enough to get Rachel Carson all upset in the 1960s about the negative effect that all of that fugitive sulphur dioxide was having on Mother Nature.
A good swift rap on the knuckles or boot in the pants never did much harm, and Rachel’s cry for decency on behalf of the industry had a salutary effect. Sulphur recovery plant efficiency rose from a 70-80% level in the 1960-1970 era to near 99% in the early years of the twenty-first century. Not a bad record, but still not enough to satisfy the bright Greens.
To make the challenge to the industry to clean up their act a bit more ‘persuasive’, the folks that design and manufacture analytical testing equipment have moved ahead, by a few orders of magnitude. The sensitivity they can achieve when it comes to detecting the “stuff that got away” has skyrocketed. PPM limits have now become PPB and, at least in the nuclear world, PPTs are now the fashion and eminently measureable. What levels of what emissions are hazardous to your health? It is becoming close to a case of: “if we can measure it, it must be harmful”.
And then there are the bureaucrats who keep adding new regulations to old rules that were based on common sense. Recently the International Maritime Organization (IMO) told us that the cargoes of formed sulphur that we load by the millions of tons for ocean transportation must be “non-combustible”, or nearly so. This notwithstanding the fact that the first thing the buyer does with 95% of the stuff on receipt is to BURN it! Other regulatory bodies see fit to argue that storing formed elemental sulphur in open air stockpiles exposed to wind and rain is no less environmentally friendly than storing it under cover and protected from the other kind of ‘elements’. Who and what is a poor sulphur marketer to believe? The best of intentions may be the very stuff that public criticism is made of.
But there is one thing that sulphur peddlers can be assured of: if you stop trying to be good neighbours the criticism will only get louder. And there is much yet to be done by way of improving sulphur’s image in the eyes of society. Sulphur is a bit like the sun - everybody enjoys its benefits, but they can be brutally antagonistic when exposure to too much of it hurts. It all depends on how the sulphur or solar message is spun by the messenger with the story to tell. Winter holidays under a sun-filled sky are very much OK, but the fact that you are sitting under an unshielded monstrous nuclear reactor that is pouring out harmful radiation is seldom heard. With sulphur the soil acidifying evils and air polluting sulphur dioxide gas emissions are well publicised, but relatively little is heard of the critical role it plays in producing the fertilizer that grows the food which billions eat each and every year of their lives.
And there is even more opportunity for sulphur in the “better life” of the future if we the people would only take time to be more conscious of the chemistry that lies hidden within this common element. Mother Nature has made it a very central component of her photosynthesis systems where she captures all these nuclear sourced rays from the sun and uses the energy to build new living substances. The muscles in your body would not work very well if there were no sulphur-sulphur bonds to make and break in biochemical processes.
It all seems too heavy stuff for the ordinary bloke to be concerned about, but somebody will latch on to some aspect of the story that can be spun into a negative image. Maybe in this official World Year Of Chemistry, we in the sulphur business can do a little teaching of the truth about thios as part of our effort to persuade society that the industry is doing its best to protect the environment, not withstanding the tales of terror told by the television.
‘Thiophilos’
As we are daily reminded by the media and many others how dirty and polluting the lives we lead have become, it seems only fair that we pause amidst the muck for a moment and examine how much, if anything, we in the sulphur business have done to clean up the mess in, say, the last couple of generations. Not withstanding the black picture painted by the Greens, it turns out that, by and large, we have not been altogether asleep at the switch. It is more a matter that the faster the industry has become cleaner, the more the people who produce the emissions have grown larger in numbers. The result - more emissions.
In the specific case of elemental sulphur, the world’s annual production of the yellow stuff has blossomed from around 3 million t/a in 1940 to well over 50 million t/a in 2010. To be fair, that growth in sulphur is offset by a reduction in the amount of iron sulphide (pyrites) that is roasted to form sulphur dioxide; that source has been displaced by burning elemental sulphur to produce the same gas to feed sulphuric acid plants. But it is still a huge increase, and one that was enough to get Rachel Carson all upset in the 1960s about the negative effect that all of that fugitive sulphur dioxide was having on Mother Nature.
A good swift rap on the knuckles or boot in the pants never did much harm, and Rachel’s cry for decency on behalf of the industry had a salutary effect. Sulphur recovery plant efficiency rose from a 70-80% level in the 1960-1970 era to near 99% in the early years of the twenty-first century. Not a bad record, but still not enough to satisfy the bright Greens.
To make the challenge to the industry to clean up their act a bit more ‘persuasive’, the folks that design and manufacture analytical testing equipment have moved ahead, by a few orders of magnitude. The sensitivity they can achieve when it comes to detecting the “stuff that got away” has skyrocketed. PPM limits have now become PPB and, at least in the nuclear world, PPTs are now the fashion and eminently measureable. What levels of what emissions are hazardous to your health? It is becoming close to a case of: “if we can measure it, it must be harmful”.
And then there are the bureaucrats who keep adding new regulations to old rules that were based on common sense. Recently the International Maritime Organization (IMO) told us that the cargoes of formed sulphur that we load by the millions of tons for ocean transportation must be “non-combustible”, or nearly so. This notwithstanding the fact that the first thing the buyer does with 95% of the stuff on receipt is to BURN it! Other regulatory bodies see fit to argue that storing formed elemental sulphur in open air stockpiles exposed to wind and rain is no less environmentally friendly than storing it under cover and protected from the other kind of ‘elements’. Who and what is a poor sulphur marketer to believe? The best of intentions may be the very stuff that public criticism is made of.
But there is one thing that sulphur peddlers can be assured of: if you stop trying to be good neighbours the criticism will only get louder. And there is much yet to be done by way of improving sulphur’s image in the eyes of society. Sulphur is a bit like the sun - everybody enjoys its benefits, but they can be brutally antagonistic when exposure to too much of it hurts. It all depends on how the sulphur or solar message is spun by the messenger with the story to tell. Winter holidays under a sun-filled sky are very much OK, but the fact that you are sitting under an unshielded monstrous nuclear reactor that is pouring out harmful radiation is seldom heard. With sulphur the soil acidifying evils and air polluting sulphur dioxide gas emissions are well publicised, but relatively little is heard of the critical role it plays in producing the fertilizer that grows the food which billions eat each and every year of their lives.
And there is even more opportunity for sulphur in the “better life” of the future if we the people would only take time to be more conscious of the chemistry that lies hidden within this common element. Mother Nature has made it a very central component of her photosynthesis systems where she captures all these nuclear sourced rays from the sun and uses the energy to build new living substances. The muscles in your body would not work very well if there were no sulphur-sulphur bonds to make and break in biochemical processes.
It all seems too heavy stuff for the ordinary bloke to be concerned about, but somebody will latch on to some aspect of the story that can be spun into a negative image. Maybe in this official World Year Of Chemistry, we in the sulphur business can do a little teaching of the truth about thios as part of our effort to persuade society that the industry is doing its best to protect the environment, not withstanding the tales of terror told by the television.
‘Thiophilos’
So much for Peak Phosphorus?
Spring is always a season of conferences, and I seem to have been on my travels more than usual over the past few months, to San Antonio for the National Petroleum Refiners Association’s (NPRA) annual get-together, to Abu Dhabi for the Sour Oil and Gas Advanced Technology (SOGAT) conference, and to New York, where The Sulphur Institute (TSI) had its annual meeting. While picking out the highlights in terms of implications for the industry and the wider world, to my own mind one of the most significant things that I learned over the past two months is that we don’t need to worry about running out of phosphorus.
This is no idle concern; while for the sulphur industry phosphate fertilizers represent 55% of all sulphur and sulphuric acid demand, for the human race it is one of the key nutrients that goes to make up our own bodies – the most common mineral element in us apart from calcium. The Peak Phosphorus debate – like concerns about a number of strategic minerals – has come hard on the heels of Peak Oil fears, but the implications were always perhaps even more worrying; while it might be difficult and expensive, we can always find substitute fuels for oil, or other ways of getting about, but there is no substitute for the role that phosphorus plays in human health and nutrition.
So the prospect of running out of this vital nutrient should perhaps have raised far more global concern than it has done. Warnings began to emerge in 2006 that we would see peak phosphorus production before 2030, with the planet completely denuded of vital phosphate resources by 2050-2100, with the prospect of mass starvation ahead for humanity, and the price peak of 2008 helped give legs to the story. Well, if it did all pass you by, let me tell you that you can relax; it turns out we’re not running out of phosphorus after all. Steven Von Kauwenbergh, phosphate geologist and principal scientist with the International Fertilizer Development Centre, has spent the past couple of years reviewing the evidence for global phosphorus reserves, and at the TSI conference in New York he told me that concerns have been overblown. In fact even economically recoverable reserves – which he puts at 60 billion tonnes – should last us at least 375 years at current rates of usage, and he estimates that global phosphate resources probably total 290 billion tonnes; enough to last 1,800 years at present rates of use. And this is, he insists, a conservative estimate; Morocco alone may have 56 billion tonnes of mineable reserves and 140 billion tonnes of total resources.
The Hubbert Curve is of course a simple mathematical model, with no scope for new technological developments which can have dramatic consequences (such as the way shale gas has transformed the natural gas market). But it is also part of the more general problem of assuming that the future is amenable to a simple extrapolation from present trends. The idea that consumption will always continue to rise is one such. For example, per capita consumption of phosphorus is not rising, but in fact falling. In 1976 it was predicted that we would be using 210 million t/a of phosphates by 2000. The figure for 2000 was actually about 160 million, and like most fertilizer nutrients, consumption has been falling in the developed world since about 1990 as we find more efficient ways of using it. Peak usage in the developing world may not be too far down the line.
Dire predictions about the future, always advanced with the best of intentions, are nothing new. And they often draw our attention to a situation which if left unchecked could indeed be problematic, or contain within them sensible ideas that we should pay heed to. It would be very much to our advantage to continue to try to improve the efficiency of our use of phosphorus, for example. However, it is reassuring to know that this doomsday scenario in particular is not one we need lose much sleep over.
This is no idle concern; while for the sulphur industry phosphate fertilizers represent 55% of all sulphur and sulphuric acid demand, for the human race it is one of the key nutrients that goes to make up our own bodies – the most common mineral element in us apart from calcium. The Peak Phosphorus debate – like concerns about a number of strategic minerals – has come hard on the heels of Peak Oil fears, but the implications were always perhaps even more worrying; while it might be difficult and expensive, we can always find substitute fuels for oil, or other ways of getting about, but there is no substitute for the role that phosphorus plays in human health and nutrition.
So the prospect of running out of this vital nutrient should perhaps have raised far more global concern than it has done. Warnings began to emerge in 2006 that we would see peak phosphorus production before 2030, with the planet completely denuded of vital phosphate resources by 2050-2100, with the prospect of mass starvation ahead for humanity, and the price peak of 2008 helped give legs to the story. Well, if it did all pass you by, let me tell you that you can relax; it turns out we’re not running out of phosphorus after all. Steven Von Kauwenbergh, phosphate geologist and principal scientist with the International Fertilizer Development Centre, has spent the past couple of years reviewing the evidence for global phosphorus reserves, and at the TSI conference in New York he told me that concerns have been overblown. In fact even economically recoverable reserves – which he puts at 60 billion tonnes – should last us at least 375 years at current rates of usage, and he estimates that global phosphate resources probably total 290 billion tonnes; enough to last 1,800 years at present rates of use. And this is, he insists, a conservative estimate; Morocco alone may have 56 billion tonnes of mineable reserves and 140 billion tonnes of total resources.
The Hubbert Curve is of course a simple mathematical model, with no scope for new technological developments which can have dramatic consequences (such as the way shale gas has transformed the natural gas market). But it is also part of the more general problem of assuming that the future is amenable to a simple extrapolation from present trends. The idea that consumption will always continue to rise is one such. For example, per capita consumption of phosphorus is not rising, but in fact falling. In 1976 it was predicted that we would be using 210 million t/a of phosphates by 2000. The figure for 2000 was actually about 160 million, and like most fertilizer nutrients, consumption has been falling in the developed world since about 1990 as we find more efficient ways of using it. Peak usage in the developing world may not be too far down the line.
Dire predictions about the future, always advanced with the best of intentions, are nothing new. And they often draw our attention to a situation which if left unchecked could indeed be problematic, or contain within them sensible ideas that we should pay heed to. It would be very much to our advantage to continue to try to improve the efficiency of our use of phosphorus, for example. However, it is reassuring to know that this doomsday scenario in particular is not one we need lose much sleep over.
Tuesday, 5 April 2011
Formed solid sulphur - the market criticality of quality
[By our guest columnist, 'Thiophilos']
Far from being a new topic of conversation, the quality of the various types of formed solid elemental sulphur available on today’s world markets nonetheless remains an important one for a variety of reasons. We live with a market that varies from boom to bust in a short few months, as was seen a couple of years ago. Predictions are for massive oversupply as energy producers drill into higher sulphur content sources of hydrocarbons. Surely competitive advantages such as product quality remain important factors in determining whether your product sells or doesn’t – and how much it sells for?
It used to be that when the market talked quality with respect to bulk solid sulphur it was chemical purity that was in mind; what was the ‘ash’ content? - meaning all the contaminant minerals present that shouldn’t be, or what was the ‘carbon’ content? - focusing on how much hydrocarbon had found its way into the not so bright yellow sulphur for sale. Or trace quantities of arsenic, selenium and tellurium (AST) that weren’t popular with the fertilizer manufacturers that converted it into sulphuric acid for phosphate production. And even the moisture content - great for keeping dust emissions down during handling and transportation but bad news for wet sulphur corrosion of iron-containing vessels that stored or transported the stuff, like marine bulk carriers. And there are more quality offending chemicals on the impurity list.
These impurities are still on the buyers ‘no-no’ list, or at least are reasons for substantial discounts to whatever the market price may be at the time. But with 50 million plus tons of the stuff moving annually through world transportation systems, another important quality feature has emerged in the solid formed version of the yellow element - its physical handling and storage characteristics. How does it respond to rough handling in bulk? Does it crush easily? Do such properties change with time in storage – the ageing process? Is it a big generator of fugitive dust emissions? Are these emissions hazardous with respect to fires, explosions or environmental impact? It is a whole new ball game as far as what is meant by quality of product.
Is this more recent emergence of a different set of quality factors for bulk formed solid elemental sulphur a valid development? It is hardly a new development. For many decades in the twentieth century it was one of the strong arguments in favour of storing and moving elemental sulphur in its liquid form. But this was in the days when sulphur was mined (Frasch) to meet market demand, not as an involuntary by-product of hydrocarbon oil refining. The buyers in those days were also well equipped to receive and handle the hot liquid product, more so than many of today’s developing countries, who import the stuff to make the acid to produce the fertilizer to feed the billions. All this on top of the specialised nature of the heated tankers needed to haul the molten sulphur half way around the world.
So what are the driving forces behind the inclusion of physical handling and storage characteristics in the Quality Factor? From a public relations and social responsibility standpoint it must surely be environmental impact. There is little doubt that if the handling of formed solid elemental sulphur generates significant quantities of fugitive dust particulates, it is hazardous on at least two counts; first the potential for fires and explosions, with all the implied safety and insurance consequences; and second, the ease of aerobic oxidation of the dust to form acid (rain) with all of its negative effects on green and growing matter – animal and vegetable and even mineral.
So what have we been doing about responding to this quality challenge for formed solid elemental sulphur? Quite a lot. A generation ago a whole bunch of world trade solid sulphur was still being moved and stored in what was called “crushed bulk” form. Many of today’s dealers in bulk sulphur are probably too young to recall the fugitive emissions from a windblown pile of crushed bulk sulphur being pushed by a bulldozer or conveyor loaded to railcar or marine bulk carrier, but it was an activity with lots of environmental impact! The era of development of higher quality formed solid sulphur began first with slate or flake, then the various wet forms that led to the granules, pastilles and prills that came to be labelled as the Premium Product that we see more and more on today’s world markets.
But just as the quality of the formed solid sulphur product has risen on the environmental and safety scales, so also have the demands of the global jurisdictions into which the bulk solid sulphur is sold. Fine particulate emissions of sulphur oxidise to acid more quickly, corrode metals more aggressively, threaten lung damage for those who breathe it and tend to burn or explode with a bigger bang. None of the above are deemed acceptable in 21st century commodity businesses. The closer we approach the 100% containment goal, the more the best and most willing buyers demand even better efforts to be really safe and environmentally friendly.
So the message is clear: the solid sulphur industry deserves credit for its work to date but, in this era of ever-increasing competition for a place in the market , the buyers are exercising their long established right to demand the best Quality for the least cost, and achieving that goal is an ever-present challenge for the solid sulphur forming industry.
‘Thiophilos’
Far from being a new topic of conversation, the quality of the various types of formed solid elemental sulphur available on today’s world markets nonetheless remains an important one for a variety of reasons. We live with a market that varies from boom to bust in a short few months, as was seen a couple of years ago. Predictions are for massive oversupply as energy producers drill into higher sulphur content sources of hydrocarbons. Surely competitive advantages such as product quality remain important factors in determining whether your product sells or doesn’t – and how much it sells for?
It used to be that when the market talked quality with respect to bulk solid sulphur it was chemical purity that was in mind; what was the ‘ash’ content? - meaning all the contaminant minerals present that shouldn’t be, or what was the ‘carbon’ content? - focusing on how much hydrocarbon had found its way into the not so bright yellow sulphur for sale. Or trace quantities of arsenic, selenium and tellurium (AST) that weren’t popular with the fertilizer manufacturers that converted it into sulphuric acid for phosphate production. And even the moisture content - great for keeping dust emissions down during handling and transportation but bad news for wet sulphur corrosion of iron-containing vessels that stored or transported the stuff, like marine bulk carriers. And there are more quality offending chemicals on the impurity list.
These impurities are still on the buyers ‘no-no’ list, or at least are reasons for substantial discounts to whatever the market price may be at the time. But with 50 million plus tons of the stuff moving annually through world transportation systems, another important quality feature has emerged in the solid formed version of the yellow element - its physical handling and storage characteristics. How does it respond to rough handling in bulk? Does it crush easily? Do such properties change with time in storage – the ageing process? Is it a big generator of fugitive dust emissions? Are these emissions hazardous with respect to fires, explosions or environmental impact? It is a whole new ball game as far as what is meant by quality of product.
Is this more recent emergence of a different set of quality factors for bulk formed solid elemental sulphur a valid development? It is hardly a new development. For many decades in the twentieth century it was one of the strong arguments in favour of storing and moving elemental sulphur in its liquid form. But this was in the days when sulphur was mined (Frasch) to meet market demand, not as an involuntary by-product of hydrocarbon oil refining. The buyers in those days were also well equipped to receive and handle the hot liquid product, more so than many of today’s developing countries, who import the stuff to make the acid to produce the fertilizer to feed the billions. All this on top of the specialised nature of the heated tankers needed to haul the molten sulphur half way around the world.
So what are the driving forces behind the inclusion of physical handling and storage characteristics in the Quality Factor? From a public relations and social responsibility standpoint it must surely be environmental impact. There is little doubt that if the handling of formed solid elemental sulphur generates significant quantities of fugitive dust particulates, it is hazardous on at least two counts; first the potential for fires and explosions, with all the implied safety and insurance consequences; and second, the ease of aerobic oxidation of the dust to form acid (rain) with all of its negative effects on green and growing matter – animal and vegetable and even mineral.
So what have we been doing about responding to this quality challenge for formed solid elemental sulphur? Quite a lot. A generation ago a whole bunch of world trade solid sulphur was still being moved and stored in what was called “crushed bulk” form. Many of today’s dealers in bulk sulphur are probably too young to recall the fugitive emissions from a windblown pile of crushed bulk sulphur being pushed by a bulldozer or conveyor loaded to railcar or marine bulk carrier, but it was an activity with lots of environmental impact! The era of development of higher quality formed solid sulphur began first with slate or flake, then the various wet forms that led to the granules, pastilles and prills that came to be labelled as the Premium Product that we see more and more on today’s world markets.
But just as the quality of the formed solid sulphur product has risen on the environmental and safety scales, so also have the demands of the global jurisdictions into which the bulk solid sulphur is sold. Fine particulate emissions of sulphur oxidise to acid more quickly, corrode metals more aggressively, threaten lung damage for those who breathe it and tend to burn or explode with a bigger bang. None of the above are deemed acceptable in 21st century commodity businesses. The closer we approach the 100% containment goal, the more the best and most willing buyers demand even better efforts to be really safe and environmentally friendly.
So the message is clear: the solid sulphur industry deserves credit for its work to date but, in this era of ever-increasing competition for a place in the market , the buyers are exercising their long established right to demand the best Quality for the least cost, and achieving that goal is an ever-present challenge for the solid sulphur forming industry.
‘Thiophilos’
Long hot summer?
The convulsions that have gripped the Middle East and North Africa in recent months are another salutary reminder of the meaning of the phrase ‘political risk’. The removal of president Ben Ali in Tunisia appears to have been fortunately - relatively - bloodless, and in Egypt after an initial heavy-handed crackdown by state police the army appears to have stepped into ensure an orderly transition of power from president Hosni Mubarak. Libya, however, with a ruler far less amenable to outside or indeed domestic pressure, has descended into a de facto civil war, while at time of writing, Bahrain has declared a three-month state of emergency and invited Saudi and other troops from its Gulf Cooperation Council partners onto the streets. Yemen is on the brink, and in Morocco, Oman, Jordan, Kuwait, Iran and Saudi Arabia itself, there have been demonstrations and riots, and things remain tense. The Arabic-speaking world appears to be in for a long, hot summer of discontent as high food prices, unemployment, inequalities of wealth, long-standing political grievances and modern communications technology all combine to create a dangerous cocktail.
As fighting rages around the oil terminals at Brega and Ras Lanuf in Libya, and oil prices climb 25% to $120/barrel, minds are bound to be concentrated on the prospects for production disruptions across the region. Some 60% of the world’s oil and 45% of natural gas resources lie within the region, and the prospect of a revolution spreading to Saudi Arabia must keep many people awake at night. Libya is only the world’s 12th largest oil producer, yet markets are clearly nervous. Even if another major oil producer is not sucked into the swirl of political unrest, the ability of the region to generate an oil shock for the global economy in 2011 comparable with that of 2008 is clearly already present, in a world already in an uncertain emergence from recession.
Fertilizer and sulphur markets have been relatively free from disruption so far, but five of the top ten sulphur exporters and three of the largest consumers lie within the region, the former in the oil and gas-rich Gulf region, and the latter based around the major concentrations of phosphate reserves, in the Maghreb and Jordan. Supplies of phosphate rock and downstream fertilizers from GCT, Tunisia were disrupted for some time after the change in government, as labour disputes at the Sfax, Gabes and La Skhira production sites continued. It was reported that production at the GCT 330,000 t/a DAP plant was continuing at just one-third of normal capacity. There are signs that output is resuming but several weeks’ production has been lost.
In ‘Anna Karenina’, Tolstoy said that; “all happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. This seems to be equally true for unhappy nations; the very different experiences of neighbouring Tunisia and Libya are testament enough to that. The events of one country are not necessarily a guide to what will happen in another, as circumstances can be very different even in the closest neighbours. Some countries in the region, for example, have the cushion of oil reserves – in Saudi Arabia King Abdullah has already spent $36 billion of his windfall gains from high oil prices on buying off dissent. But while the bloodshed of the Libyan civil war appears to have given a temporary pause to some of the momentum for change elsewhere, that momentum nevertheless remains. To concentrate solely on the balance sheet is to eclipse the wider significance of a protest movement which many have compared to those that swept Europe and North America in 1968, or central and eastern Europe in 1989. Regional dictators like Mubarak have often held up the spectre of radical Islamism to justify their position to a West that has often been only too happy to indulge them, but there is clearly a secular rather than sectarian mood afoot. Where the pieces of the puzzle will fall remains an open question, but may well end up reshaping an entire region.
As fighting rages around the oil terminals at Brega and Ras Lanuf in Libya, and oil prices climb 25% to $120/barrel, minds are bound to be concentrated on the prospects for production disruptions across the region. Some 60% of the world’s oil and 45% of natural gas resources lie within the region, and the prospect of a revolution spreading to Saudi Arabia must keep many people awake at night. Libya is only the world’s 12th largest oil producer, yet markets are clearly nervous. Even if another major oil producer is not sucked into the swirl of political unrest, the ability of the region to generate an oil shock for the global economy in 2011 comparable with that of 2008 is clearly already present, in a world already in an uncertain emergence from recession.
Fertilizer and sulphur markets have been relatively free from disruption so far, but five of the top ten sulphur exporters and three of the largest consumers lie within the region, the former in the oil and gas-rich Gulf region, and the latter based around the major concentrations of phosphate reserves, in the Maghreb and Jordan. Supplies of phosphate rock and downstream fertilizers from GCT, Tunisia were disrupted for some time after the change in government, as labour disputes at the Sfax, Gabes and La Skhira production sites continued. It was reported that production at the GCT 330,000 t/a DAP plant was continuing at just one-third of normal capacity. There are signs that output is resuming but several weeks’ production has been lost.
In ‘Anna Karenina’, Tolstoy said that; “all happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. This seems to be equally true for unhappy nations; the very different experiences of neighbouring Tunisia and Libya are testament enough to that. The events of one country are not necessarily a guide to what will happen in another, as circumstances can be very different even in the closest neighbours. Some countries in the region, for example, have the cushion of oil reserves – in Saudi Arabia King Abdullah has already spent $36 billion of his windfall gains from high oil prices on buying off dissent. But while the bloodshed of the Libyan civil war appears to have given a temporary pause to some of the momentum for change elsewhere, that momentum nevertheless remains. To concentrate solely on the balance sheet is to eclipse the wider significance of a protest movement which many have compared to those that swept Europe and North America in 1968, or central and eastern Europe in 1989. Regional dictators like Mubarak have often held up the spectre of radical Islamism to justify their position to a West that has often been only too happy to indulge them, but there is clearly a secular rather than sectarian mood afoot. Where the pieces of the puzzle will fall remains an open question, but may well end up reshaping an entire region.
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