United States industrial hydrogen requirements

The largest consumer of coke is the iron and steel industry. In the United States, ca 600 kg of coke is used to produce a metric ton of steel. Japanese equipment and practice reduce the requirement to 400—450 kg. Coke is also used to gas from the char in one vessel. The reducing gas converts iron oxide to iron in the upper two stages of a second vessel. Steam is converted to hydrogen and reoxidizes the iron in two stages in the lower half of the vessel. 

The Better Bean Initiative from the United Soybean Board of USA is developing the mid-oleic soybean oil, which will not require hydrogenation for industrial frying apphcations. Full commercialization of this oil will take at least six to ten years. In the meantime, the food industry in the United States will have to be very creative to reduce trans-faXs in fried foods as well as in other products. 

What is unusual about ethylene is that it occurs only in trace amounts in nature. The enormous amounts of it required to meet the needs of the chemical industry are derived the world over by thermal cracking of hydrocarbons. In the United States and other areas of the world with vast reserves of natural gas, the major process for the production of ethylene is thermal cracking of the small quantities of ethane extracted from natural gas. In thermal cracking, a saturated hydrocarbon is converted to an unsaturated hydrocarbon plus H2. Heating ethane in a furnace to 800-900 °C for a fraction of a second cracks it to ethylene and hydrogen. 

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