Tag: Prices

It’s a slightly dispiriting fact about the sulphur industry that most of its producers don’t really want it. If you’re a refiner or a sour gas producer, you mainly care about the diesel and gasoline or natural gas that you can process and sell, and the sulphur is just the inconvenient component that the law and your customers force you to remove. But at times when sulphur prices, as they have at the start of this January, reach levels as high as $300/t, then the industry standing joke is that sulphur suddenly stops being a by-product or waste product, and starts to become a ‘co-product’ instead.

Meena Chauhan , Head of Sulphur and Sulphuric Acid Research, Argus Media, assesses price trends and the market outlook for sulphur.

Market Insight courtesy of Argus Media

Market Insight courtesy of Argus Media

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.

Soaring natural gas prices in Europe, up to five times higher than normal, have led to numerous economic shutdowns of ammonia capacity across the continent. This has coincided with shutdowns in the US due to hurricane season, reducing availability considerably and driving up prices in the western hemisphere.

Meena Chauhan, Head of Sulphur and Sulphuric Acid Research, Argus Media, assesses price trends and the market outlook for sulphur.

A seasonal decline in weather conditions in the eastern Atlantic will hinder operations at Jorf Lasfar in Morocco through the end of 2021 and into 2022. In South Africa, port congestion problems were challenging at Richard’s Bay with vessels subjected to 15 day wait times, increasing demurrage costs.

Th e past year has seen an extraordinary run-up in sulphur and sulphuric acid prices, the former from a low of around $50-70/t f.o.b. in mid-2020 to more than $100/t higher than that at the end of Q1 2021. Prices then plateaued for much of this year, but they have begun moving inexorably upwards again in the past couple of months, drawn by rapidly rising phosphate prices, and Middle East sulphur rates recently breached price levels not seen since 2012.

Market Insight courtesy of Argus Media