Engineering options for sulfur sequestration: Sulfur waste stabilization with byproduct energy

While sulfur continues to be an important industrial chemical, increased processing of sour fossil fuels is causing a sulfur glut in the world market. In places like Kazakhstan and western Canada, yellow sulfur has begun to pile up near gas and oil sand processing units, and no working solution exists to deal with all of it. With the processing of sour natural gas and oil sands on the rise, chemically reactive sulfur has become a major industrial waste stream. Sulfur piles present environmental and safety hazards that need to be resolved. We propose safe and permanent disposal technologies, based on stabilizing sulfur in the form of gypsum as alternatives to the long-standing practice of converting hydrogen sulfide to elemental sulfur and of injecting acid gas into underground reservoirs. We focus, in particular, on technologies that take advantage of the energy released during the process of generating gypsum as a chemically stable waste product.