Production of Fertilizer and Sulfuric Acid at Coal-fired Power Plants is Commercial but lots of New Opportunities
The Hot Topic on January 17, 2013 covered some byproducts of coal-firing. One of our speakers addressed a technology already in wide use for making sulfuric acid. The other talked about cutting edge systems.
Patrick Polk, Account Manager for Sulfuric Acid Catalyst and WSA Technology at Haldor Topsoe, discussed WSA and SNOX processes. These processes are proven technologies for treating flue gases or other sulfur containing waste streams. The processes are exothermic and produce a marketable, commercial grade sulfuric acid by-product. The energy efficiency of the process improves with an increasing SO2 concentration in the flue gas, allowing high sulfur coal or petcoke to be fired. So the higher the sulfur content in the coal the less CO2/kWh. This contrasts to a limestone scrubber which uses more parasitic energy with high sulfur coals.
Haldor Topsoe has a large number of systems just addressing the SO2. The WSA process is used in a number of power plants associated with refineries and smelters. There are also a few plants where both SO2 and NOx are removed with the SNOX process.
Robert Tang, President and CEO of CEFCO Global Clean Energy LLC, discussed approaches to capture all pollutants and then to convert all “captured pollutants” with appropriate reagents into recovered, segregated, valuable, and saleable end-products. There were some impressive estimates of the sales value of potassium sulfate and potassium nitrate. Robert pointed out that ammonium nitrate manufacture is now prohibited in some countries because of its potential use as an explosive. Presently there are ongoing activities in the refining and petrochemical industries.
There was also a quick review of the McIlvaine Power Plant Air Quality Decisions which covers the following additional byproducts:
§ Ammonium sulfate
§ Replacement of precipitated calcium carbonate for paper
§ Production of hydrochloric acid
§ Rare earth extraction
Bios, Abstracts and Photos
can be seen at:
BIOS, ABSTRACTS, PHOTO - 1-17-13.htm
The individual presentations are as follows: