Tag: Hydrogen

Global nitrogen and methanol markets are currently in the grip of a crisis in feedstock prices. Mostly this is about Europe’s dependence on imported natural gas, but – particularly on the methanol side – it has also been exacerbated by high coal prices in China, where heavy rains have led to flooding in Shanxi province, the source of one third of China’s coal. These have followed similar floods in Henan in July, and come at a time when China is facing power rationing due to a lack of electricity supply. The world economy’s long-awaited bounce back from the covid pandemic has also led to a general global surge in energy demand, and consequently higher oil and gas prices.

As sulphur recovery units operate at progressively higher temperatures, creep stress in the furnace refractory lining can lead to deformation or even failure of the bricks and require the shutdown of the SRU. UK-based DSF Refractories have developed a product which minimises creep stress damage at high temperatures, for a longer-lived furnace lining.

RSK and its subsidiary ADAS have developed a sustainable solution for the disposal of sulphur waste generated from a natural gas processing facility in Iraq. C. Teulon of RSK reports on the research that was carried out to test whether the waste sulphur from a biological sulphur removal process could be applied in agriculture to increase the quality and quantity of crops in Iraq.

Considering the current shift to produce biofuels instead of conventional oil products, M. van Son of Comprimo discusses the impact that this may have on the ability to process the sour water acid gas streams produced in existing or new sour water strippers.

The Valkyrie™ process was first introduced as a reborn version of redox technology for treating H2 S in natural gas processing.In this article Streamline Innovations Inc. highlights some of the new developments and successful applications of the Valkyrie process and its redox technology, in both gas and water streams.

M. Rameshni and S. Santo of RATE discuss different sour water stripping gas processing options, depending on contaminants in the sour water streams and site-specific requirements.

New low-cost metal oxide solid scavengers for hydrogen sulphide (H2 S) removal from wet and dry natural gas have been developed and deployed at commercial scale. The desulphurisation process uses a proprietary sorbent chemistry to achieve a high sulphur capacity and removal efficiency. G. Alptekin, F. Kugler and M. Schaefer of SulfaTrap LLC describe the new technology and its performance.

Buss ChemTech AG offers the international phosphate industry a robust solution to create added-value products from fluorosilicic acid (FSA). Thomas Dahlke, the head of the company’s process engineering department, and Emre Sen, sales manager for fluorine technologies, explain how this can be done in a sustainable manner.

BHP has finally given the go ahead for stage one of its Jansen potash mine project in Saskatchewan, Canada.

While the past couple of years have seen considerable excitement and momentum concerning the use of blue/green ammonia as a fuel, an announcement in August by Maersk, the largest shipping company in the world, has served once again as a useful reminder that ammonia is not the only candidate molecule. Maersk said on August 24th that it is ordering eight methanol powered vessels from South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries at a total cost of $1.4 billion. Each giant ship will have the capacity to carry 16,000 twenty-foot [container] equivalent units (TEUs).