In a few short years Abu Dhabi has grown to become the world’s largest sulphur producer and exporter, and new sour gas projects will lead to additional sulphur recovery capacity, provided they can overcome economic challenges.
Sulphur’s annual survey of recent, current and future sulphur recovery unit construction projects maps the developing shape of brimstone production from fuel and gas processing plants worldwide.
We highlight recent innovations in sulphuric acid plant design and construction. NORAM and CPPE are offering a new hybrid sulphuric acid process. KVT, meanwhile, has upgraded its wet sulphuric acid technology to reduce capex, opex and emissions. Improved methods of construction and new materials from Koch Knight are also helping to optimise acid tower design
A look at the major factors influencing the sulphur market around the world.
With the ongoing changes in gas field and refinery feedstock compositions, many sulphur recovery units around the world are facing turndown scenarios to such an extent that it is difficult to meet stringent environmental regulations. Equipment and instrumentation behave differently under turndown conditions, and not always in ways that are desirable. Start-ups and shutdowns can place demands on the equipment that are more severe than years of normal operation. In this article, Optimized Gas Treating, Sulfur Recovery Engineering and Comprimo share some of their learnings and experiences of these scenarios.
R. Kranenburg of Duiker discusses the latest applications of SCO units in refineries and petrochemical complexes. The SCO unit is typically integrated in the sulphur recovery unit and is intended for processing ammonia, while also treating the tail gases from the upstream SRU.
Now in its second year, SulGas 2020, South Asia’s only conference on gas treating and sulphur recovery, took place 3-4 February 2020 at the Novotel – Juhu Beach, in Juhu, Mumbai, India.
J. C. Bourdon, F. H. Brown and P. J. Photos of Streamline Innovations Inc. present the development and commercialisation of the Valkyrie™ process, which employs new chemistries and advanced control systems to remove H2 S from natural gas at size scales ranxging from single wells to entire fields, providing an operationally sustainable and commercially attractive alternative to standard H2 S removal technologies.
Hydrocarbon contamination of sour water streams feeding sour water strippers is a well-known challenge in the refining and gas processing industry. The source of this challenge is the formation of a stable oil emulsion in an aqueous phase that may contain both H 2 S and NH 3 . The typical approach to the problem involves large residence time tanks with the assumption that droplet settling will occur over a long enough time frame. In practice, droplet settling is very slow due to a variety of reasons, and as a result, operators encounter sour water heat exchanger fouling, stripper fouling, hydrocarbon excursions to sulphur recovery units along with other operating challenges. M. Thundyil, D. Seeger and E. McIntosh of Transcend Solutions present a case study of the TORSEP™ oil and solids removal system for contamination removal from a sour water feed stream. The case study illustrates the effect on heat exchanger fouling along with the effect of the variation of several system parameters on operating performance and economics.
CRU’s Sulphur + Sulphuric Acid 2019 conference was held in Houston last November.