Tag: Metso

A report on CRU’s annual Sulphur + Sulphuric Acid conference, which returned to being face to face meeting at the end of October 2022.

Saudi Arabia’s Ras Al-Khair Industrial City has signed an industrial land agreement with local firm Gulf Copper to develop a copper smelting and casting plant at an investment $319.30 million. The project would be developed on a plot spanning more than 250,000 square metres in the industrial city. No construction timelines were given. The Saudi government has previously signed agreements with Trafigura and Saudi-based Modern Mineral Holding to develop a 400,000 t/a copper smelter at Ras Al Khair which would also include 200,000 t/a of zinc and 55,000 t/a of lead smelter capacity at a projected cost of $2.8 billion.

After two years of virtual events, the CRU Sulphur + Sulphuric Acid 2022 Conference & Exhibition will return to an in-person event at the World Forum, The Hague, 24-26 October 2022. CRU will be welcoming the global sulphur and sulphuric acid community to this premier annual event for networking and essential updates on the markets and technical developments that are influencing the industry.

At the end of June a three day strike among workers at Chilean state mining company Codelco paralysed copper output at the world’s largest copper producer. The strike was in protest at the threatened closure of the Ventanas smelter, which was the site of an alleged leak of sulphur dioxide on June 6th. Chile’s environmental regulator subsequently provisional measures for both Codelco and power company AES Chile after numerous people in the nearby towns of Quintero and Puchuncavi in central Chile, including hundreds of high school students and staff, showed signs of sulphur dioxide poisoning. The measures include the installation of a new temperature sensor to measure potential thermal inversions. Both companies have denied responsibility for the leak; Codelco says that its air quality stations recorded normal levels of SO2 during the time of the incident.

Condensate formation in sulphuric acid plants can cause severe corrosion problems leading to high maintenance and plant downtime. Santhosh S . of Metso Outotec discusses the importance of carrying out regular monitoring and maintaining accurate and detailed data about condensate to increase equipment life and avoid downtime. Different sources of condensate formation in the plant are discussed as well as the typical locations in the plant where the condensates end up.

The Jordan Phosphate Mines Company (JPMC) has signed a supply agreement with Germany’s LUMA-International Company.Under the terms of the agreement, JPMC will sell 850,000 t/a of phosphate rock to the German company at international market rates. The agreement was signed by JPMC CEO Abdulwahab Rawad and managing director of LUMA-International Ralf Keller, in the presence of JPMC Chairman Muhammad Thneibat. Thneibat expressed hope that the deal would open wider scopes of cooperation between the JPMC and German companies in the field of phosphate fertilizers, and Keller likewise said that his company was looking forward to more cooperation with the JPMC and new partnerships to produce phosphoric acid and phosphate fertilizers.

German slurry handling specialist Vogelsang has just launched a new acidification technology which it claims will reduce ammonia emissions from agriculture, reducing up to 70% of ammonia to nutrient rich ammonium. Its new SyreN technology is an onboard sulphuric acid dosing system for tractors that treats slurry or digestate as it is applied to the land. It uses a front-linkage mounted unit to carry the acid, which also improves tractor weight distribution. The acid is dosed when the organic fertiliser is fed to the applicator, with a pH regulator automatically controlling and adjusting the flow. Nitrogen uptake of organic fertilizer is also increased by up to 1/3 as the ammonium is more easily metabolised by the soil. Results from a study in Germany showed that the acidifying slurry increased crop yield by up to 20%. The sulphur contained in the acid also becomes available to the plants as sulphate after spreading, eliminating the need for an additional pass over the field to administer a supplementary sulphur fertiliser, such as ammonium sulphate nitrate. At approximately 30 kg/ha, the amount of sulphur introduced into the crop with the SyreN system corresponds to the average amount of sulphur that is already applied to crops in the course of a growing season.

DuPont has agreed to sell its Clean Technologies business for $510 million to an international private equity consortium, comprising BroadPeak Global, Asia Green Fund and The Saudi Arabian Industrial Investments Company (Dussur). The new, independent company has been named Elessent Clean Technologies and will be a global leader in process technologies to drive sustainability and carbon neutrality in the metal, fertilizer, chemical and oil refining industries. Elessent retains exclusive rights to the technologies, expertise, products, and services including: MECS® sulphuric acid and environmental technologies, BELCO® scrubbing technologies, STRATCO® alkylation technology and IsoTherming® hydroprocessing technology. Derived from the words “element” and “essential,” Elessent says that it will help customers produce, optimise or separate essential elements every day, creating clean alternatives to traditional industrial processes to minimise the impact on the environment while enabling our customers to produce essential elements critical to everyday life.

CRU Events will convene the 2022 Phosphates International Conference & Exhibition in Florida at the Tampa Marriott Water Street, 7-9 March.

A look at papers presented at CRU’s annual Sulphur + Sulphuric Acid conference, which was once again held virtually, in November 2021.