Tag: Production

The refining industry, the source of half of the world’s elemental sulphur, continues to face major structural changes from changing feedstock and product slates and increasing regulatory burdens.

At the time of writing this editorial, the World Economic Forum was having its usual annual meeting in the Swiss resort of Davos. Prior to this year’s meeting, as usual the WEF had produced its annual Global Risks Report to serve as a talking point for the meeting. While some of the risks were as usual political and economic, from proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the “retreat from multilateralism” to growing inequalities of wealth in the developed world and “domestic political polarisation”, for the first time in the organisation’s history, the top five global risks in the report ranked by likeliness – which looks at potential global pitfalls over the next 10 years – were environmental. Perhaps with the pictures of Australia’s bush fire season fresh in their minds, the 750 experts ranked extreme weather events as the most likely, but climate change, biodiversity loss and sustainability in agriculture all ranked highly.

‘Green’ methanol means many things to different people. It encompasses low carbon emissions methanol manufacture at scale, recovery of material through waste gasification and conversion to methanol and power to liquid (e-fuel) methanol via electrochemistry and sometimes a combination of all of the above. Each route has a place in reducing the overall carbon footprint of production and subsequent use of methanol, driven by both governmental incentives or societal demand. In this article Andrew Fenwick of Johnson Matthey reviews the various routes to manufacture.

Dr MP Sukumaran Nair, former Secretary to the Chief Minister and Chairman of the Public Sector Restructuring and Audit Board for the Government of Kerala, provides an update on India’s plans to achieve self-sufficiency in urea production by 2022.

thyssenkrupp Industrial Solutions (tkIS) offers and builds Power-to-X plants and can provide all processes of the value chain, from water electrolysis and CO2 recovery to green ammonia, green methanol and green SNG. Renewable methanol production, which combines the application of carbon capture and utilisation with chemical energy storage, is a particularly promising sustainable solution.

Brazil is the main centre for new nitrogen demand in Latin America, but in spite of major oil and gas discoveries in the 2000s, has failed to develop a downstream nitrogen fertilizer industry.

The different flame velocities of reactants in the combustion space of a secondary reformer have a significant impact on the gas inlet temperature of the catalyst and the methane conversion in front of the catalyst. Based on this fact, Hanno Tautz Engineering introduces an alternative secondary reformer design. Compared with the state-of-the-art-technology, the alternative design shows advantages for hydrogen production efficiency and product capacity.

Cryogenic purge gas recovery units are very tolerant to increased flow from ammonia plant debottlenecking, especially the cryogenic cold box section. However, overload of the dehydration system upstream of the cold box can lead to fouling, loss of hydrogen recovery performance and the need for costly shutdown and thaw. Awareness of key plant parameters and some simple precautions can avoid such problems. A. J. Finn and T. R. Tomlinson of Costain provide some guidance.

Leading nitrogen and phosphate producers, including ICL, OCP and Yara, have all launched major sustainable fertilizer production projects. The aim is to incorporate recovered nutrients or low-carbon feedstocks into their manufacturing processes.

ChemBe process from EcoPhos merges beneficiation with chemical processing to generate high-quality phosphoric acid and dicalcium phosphate products. Mohamed Takhim , the CEO and founder of EcoPhos, describes how the ChemBe process is being implemented at the Evergrow project in Egypt.