Someone asked "what do the refineries do with the sulphur they remove from the oil?"
so I stopped in at our local sulfur plant:
to check out the situation.
H2S is extracted from oil and gas and partially burned producing a mixture of H2S and SO2. This is then catalytically converted to H2O and sulfur. The sulfur comes out of the process molten and is
poured out (see:
Devco Kazakhstan photo ) to form a solid block:
There has been a surplus of sulfur on the market for several years but now there is
a demand so the stockpile is being melted down and loaded into molten sulfur railroad tankers:
Several more passes by this machine will melt the whole block.
Sulfur is also shipped in solid form, in open railcars.
I neglected to ask how much sulfur was there but I guesstimate 1/4 million tons. Annual world production is about 60 million tons.
I even got a free sample!
According to the USGS
"Through its major derivative, sulfuric acid, sulfur ranks as
one of the more-important elements used as an industrial raw
material. It is of prime importance to every sector of the
world's industrial and fertilizer complexes. Sulfuric acid
production is the major end use for sulfur, and consumption
of sulfuric acid has been regarded as one of the best indexes
of a nation's industrial development. More sulfuric acid
is produced in the United States every year than any other chemical."
If oil production declines sulfur will no longer be a cheap and plentiful by-product of the oil and gas industry. It will have to be produced by the "energy intensive" Frasch process. See WebElements . (This page also explains why "sulfur" is no longer a "ph-word")