Sulfur continued synthetic fuels

With the advent of new uses for sulfur in the near future, there is no present evidence that by-product sulfur from synthetic fuel plants will swamp the sulfur market in this century. If Frasch production still continues to decline the new markets continue to develop, sulfut imports may still be required in the year 2000. 

In 1979 sulfur obtained as a by-product from petroleum refining accounted for 19.7 percent of total sulfur produced in the U.S. The requirement to desulfurize residual fuels or alternatively to refine them to finished transportation fuels will result in a substantial increase in sulfur produced at refineries even if medium sweet crudes continue to be the primary refinery feedstock. However, most experts predict that crudes will become sourer in the future. The contribution from natural gas is an additional uncertainty. Conventional wisdom predicts that natural gas demand will maintain current levels or possibly decline over the next 20 years. The combination of these factors may increase conventional by-product sulfur from petroleum and natural gas by a factor of three or more by the year 2000. This would bring its sulfur contribution up to approximately 12 million tons by 2000, the same as that predicted by the MITRE estimate for synthetic fuels sulfur production. Thus, a possible total contribution of 60 percent of projected sulfur demand could be met by the combination of these by-product sources of sulfur. 

Other typical pyrotechnic fuels include charcoal, sulfur, boron, siUcon, and synthetic polymers such as poly(vinyl alcohol) and poly(vinyl chloride). Extensive use has been made of natural products such as starches and gums, and the use of these materials continues to be substantial in the fireworks industry. MiUtary pyrotechnics have moved away from the use of natural products due to the inherent variabiUty in these materials depending on climatic conditions during the growth of the plants from which the compounds are derived. 

Improvement of the atmosphere continues to be of great concern. The continual search for fossil fuel resources can lead to the exploitation of coal, shale, and secondary and tertiary oil recovery schemes. For instance, the industrialization of China, with its substantial resource of sulfur coals, requires consideration of the effect of sulfur oxide emissions. Indeed, the sulfur problem may be the key in the more rapid development of coal usage worldwide. Furthermore, the fraction of aromatic compounds in liquid fuels derived from such natural sources or synthetically developed is found to be large, so that, in general, such fuels have serious sooting characteristics. 

Obviously, the chromatographic principles are the same in process and laboratory GCs and they are built up in a very similar way. Standard detectors are in each case the thermal conductivity detector (TCD), which is a universal detector for all components, and the flame ionization detector (HD), which is a specific detector for hydrocarbons. To detect sulfur gases selective detectors like an electrochemical detector, chemiluminescence detector and, most important, flame photometric detector (FPD) are used. Gaseous fuels hke natural gas, synthetic gases, and blends are complex mixtures that cannot completely be separated in a single column. Two or more different columns must be combined. To monitor the fuel quality a quasi-continuous analysis is necessary this means that very short cycle times must be realized. To do so, high-boiling components are removed... 

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