Sulfuric acid production statistics

The United Nations Statistical Yearbook (2) contains statistics for countries throughout the world on population, manpower, land use, agriculture, forestry, and fisheries, mining and quarrying, manufacture (for a selected group of important products such as foods and fuels), external trade, balance of payments, national income, currency arid credits, public finance, social welfare, and education. Production statistic include data for suhuric, hydrochloric, and nitric acid, caustic soda, superphosphates, nitrogenous fertilizers, benzoV phosphate rock, potash, and sulfur. 

A statistical yearbook of the Furnish industries 16) includes general statistics for the various branches of industry (value of output, number of workers, wages, and motive power), and detailed tables of output and raw material consumption by the different industries. Chemicals for which output figures are given include paints, varnishes, and lacquers, superphosphate, turpentine, explosives, chlorine, caustic soda (solid and solution), hydrochloric acid,. phosphates, trichlorethylene, chlorophenolates, calcium hypochlorite, carbon tetrachloride, calcium carbide, potassium chlorate, carbon dioxide (hquid), sulfuric acid, water glaiss, metasilicate, plastics and synthetic resins, dichloro-ethane, and chloral. For lacquers and varnishes, and plastics and synthetic resins, data are given for individual products. 

Germany. The Statistisches Bundesamt, the federal West German statistical office, publishes statistics in Die Industrie der Bundesrepublik 30), Part I gives monthly statistics of employment and unemployment, hours and wages, and fuel and electricity supplies and consumption by individual industries. Part II gives monthly production statistics for mining, fuel and power, and the main industries. Chemicals included are sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, chlorine, caustic soda, synthetic ammonia. 

The Italian chemical journal, Rassegna Chemica 50), contains articles on technical and industrial developments and on chemical markets in Italy. Monthly statistics on Italian chemical production (quoted from the Ministry of Industry and Commerce) include the following synthetic ammonia, nitric acid, sulfuric acid, sodium carbonate, caustic soda, alumina, trichlorethylene, calcium carbide, carbon disulfide, explosives, superphosphates, ammonium sulfate, calcium cyanamide, calcium nitrate, ammonium nitrate, copper sulfate, dyestuffs, ethyl alcohol, methanol, tanning extracts, tartaric acid, citric acid, wood pulp and cellulose, and sodium nitrate. 

Before the challenges that face the industry can be reasonably discussed, the industry itself must be defined. Specific statistics that give adequate comparisons on sales, pounds, and total value of synthetic organic chemicals sold are not easy to determine, and it becomes necessary to define the industry by a process of elimination. The United States Department of Commerce reports that the aggregate of sales among chemicals and allied products accounted for about 23 billion in 1957. In Table I, it can be seen that almost 18 billion of this aggregate were accounted for by finished product sales synthetic rubber, paints, soaps, fertilizers, and pharmaceuticals or by inorganic chemicals such as sulfuric acid, ammonia, and chlorine. 

It is worth noting that in the case of sulfuric acid, this competition between isomerization and deprotonation/reprotonation is greatly enhanced. Indeed, in this medium, the final hydride transfer can only take place at the interface consequently, repetitive deprotonation/reprotonation steps occur, yielding only highly deuterated products, whereas at the surface of the solid where the hydride transfer is faster, giving a statistical distribution of isotopologues. 

The statistical study made by the U.S. Coast Guard (U.S. Coast Guard, 1999) in the United States from 1992 to 1996 lists 423 spills of hazardous substances from ships or port installations, for an average of 85 spills each year. The total of these spills is 7,500 tons, half in sulfuric acid. The nine most frequently spilled products are those that dissolve in water (sulfuric acid, phosphoric acid, caustic soda), products that evaporate and dissolve in water (acrylonitrile, vinyl acetate), and petrochemical-based products that float and/or evaporate (benzene, toluene, xylene, styrene). These are shown in Table 43.2. 

Pyrites, too, are reported by the U.S. Geological Survey and National Resources Canada, in sulfur statistics. The substitute product for sulfur in the manufacture of sulfuric acid was pyrites (note this is the singular and plural spelling of the word). For most of the first half of the 19 century, pyrites had little maiket share, but during the second half, pyrites dominated the sulfuric acid market. 

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