Sulphur 416 Jan-Feb 2025
31 January 2025
A complete listing of all articles and news items that appeared in Sulphur magazine during 2024.
Sulphur output in North America continues to decline due to refinery closures and conversions at the same time that acid demand is increasing for metals processing projects.
Gunnison has started producing pure copper cathodes at its Johnson Camp Mine (JCM) in southeast Arizona, United States, from a solvent extraction-electrowinning (SX-EW) circuit and using leaching technology from Rio Tinto-owned Nuton. As well as giving Gunnison exclusive rights to deploy the proprietary process on run-of-mine ore, Nuton is a financial partner of the Phoenix-headquartered mine developer which has restarted copper production at past-producing JCM. The company’s next goal is to ramp-up to nameplate plant capacity of 25 million lbs/year (11,300 t/a) of finished copper.
South America has become the largest importing region for nitrogen fertilizers, with Brazil overtaking India as the world’s largest urea importer. While there have been attempts to use local gas to develop a domestic nitrogen industry, these have faced challenges on a number of fronts.
The past few years have seen a rapid increase in attempts to generate ammonia from streams of nitrate polluted wastewater, but how practical are these methods?
Nitric acid demand continues to be dominated by fertilizer uses via various nitrate and NPK fertilizers, but industrial chemical production, metallurgical uses and explosives production are continuing to contribute to growth, especially in Asia.