Use of Sulfuric Acid and Sulfur Gases: DuPont Recycles at Texas Refinery

Responding to global demands for cleaner air and increasingly sophisticated methods of air pollution control, DuPont has broken ground on its newest Air Emission Reduction Project that promises the environmental equivalent of taking 50,000 cars (one in 10 cars) off El Paso roads and setting a standard for healthier refinery emissions. For decades, DuPont has offered Sulfuric Acid Regeneration (SAR) services to refiners who use sulfuric acid as a catalyst in alkylation. With this latest project, a combined effort with El Paso's Western Refining, DuPont is offering an integrated approach. An on-site sulfuric acid unit, which receives spent acid from the refinery's alkylation unit and sulfur gases from the refinery's process units, recycles the spent acid and converts the sulfur gases to sulfuric acid. It then returns fresh sulfuric acid to the refinery's alkylation unit.

The resulting benefit is a 74 percent reduction in the refinery's sulfur dioxide emissions from processing sulfur gases -- making it one of the cleanest operating, sulfuric acid-using refineries in the world. The new unit will be owned and operated by DuPont under a commercial agreement. It is the first sulfuric acid regeneration facility of its kind
in the southwestern United States. The project will allow more efficient management of sulfur processing at the refinery, and enables the plant'stwo processing lines to recycle and reuse sulfur gases and spent sulfuric acid from the petroleum refining process. The project will improve the competitiveness of Western Refining by allowing the refinery to use more "sour crude" oil. Today, petroleum refiners are handling crude oil with higher sulfur content than ever.

At the same time, they are required to produce low-sulfur products, and to reduce the sulfur emissions generated in the process. DuPont's Environmental Solutions business offers science-based services and solutions to help petroleum refiners respond to these challenges in a way that reduces their environmental footprint. "Our goal is to become the single-source solution for our global customers' most difficult sulfur-related challenges," said Joseph Skurla, business development director for DuPont Chemical Solutions. "We are in discussion with a number of other refineries, both inside and outside the United States, concerning the development of similar projects. We are pleased to be able to share our expertise and clean technologies with the world." DuPont's first on-site SAR unit at the Valero Refinery in Delaware City, Del. started operations in September 2005; another at the ConocoPhillips refinery in Linden, N.J. recently broke ground.

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