Sulfur, abundance sources

Unfortunately, scrubbers are expensive, and the CaS03, which has no commercial uses, must be disposed of in land fills. Much more work on methods to control acidic emissions remains to be done because the problem will grow more serious as sources of low-sulfur coal are exhausted and power plants are forced to rely on more abundant sources of high-sulfur coal. 

Figure 6 Histogram showing sulfur abundance in marine sediments. Data are from a variety of sources but exclude...

Magnesium sulfate heptahydrate may be prepared by neutralization of sulfuric acid with magnesium carbonate or oxide, or it can be obtained directly from natural sources. It occurs abundantly as a double salt and can also be obtained from the magnesium salts that occur in brines used for the extraction of bromine (qv). The brine is treated with calcium hydroxide to precipitate magnesium hydroxide. Sulfur dioxide and air are passed through the suspension to yield magnesium sulfate (see Chemicals frombrine). Magnesium sulfate is a saline cathartic. 

Pyrite is the most abundant of the metal sulfides. Eor many years, until the Erasch process was developed, pyrite was the main source of sulfur and, for much of the first half of the twentieth century, comprised over 50% of world sulfur production. Pyrite reserves are distributed throughout the world and known deposits have been mined in about 30 countries. Possibly the largest pyrite reserves in the world are located in southern Spain, Portugal, and the CIS. Large deposits are also in Canada, Cypms, Einland, Italy, Japan, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, the United States, and Yugoslavia. However, the three main regional producers of pyrites continue to be Western Europe Eastern Europe, including the CIS and China. 

The prevalence of sulfur s second most abundant isotope, S, along with the fractionation known to occur in many biogeochemical processes, make isotopic studies of sulfur a potentially fruitful method of unraveling its sources and sinks within a given reservoir. 

What are the relative contributions of these two sources Two approaches have been taken. One is to establish the geology and hydrology of a basin in great detail. This has been carried out for the Amazon (Stallard and Edmond, 1981) with the result that evaporites contribute about twice as much sulfate as sulfide oxidation. The other approach is to apply sulfur isotope geochemistry. As mentioned earlier, there are two relatively abundant stable isotopes of S, and The mean 34/32 ratio is 0.0442. However, different source rocks have different ratios, which arise from slight differences in the reactivities of the isotopes. These deviations are expressed as a difference from a standard, in the case of sulfur the standard being a meteorite found at Canyon Diablo, Arizona. 

Since it contains water of crystallization, and because it is cheap and abundant, it was proposed as a temp reducing (cooling) agent in permissible expls (See Hydrated Explosives). It was also previously used as a source of sulfur and for the prepn of sulfuric acid. Many other uses are listed in Refs 3 St 5... 

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