Sulphur prills render environmental pollution by sulphur harmless?

So HAZCO insists.  The photo at the right shows a sample of sulphur prills that were produced at Shell's Shantz sulphur storage and handling facility.

   Most certainly, the prills make a pretty picture that causes the heart to jump for anyone intending to make money with producing, shipping and selling them.

   Sulphur has a specific gravity or density of 2.1, meaning that a given volume of solid sulphur (air excluded) is 2.1 times as heavy as an equal volume of water or about as heavy as an equal volume of grain produced in agriculture. 

   As is the case at Shell's Shantz sulphur facility, formed sulphur is shipped in unit trains of a hundred or more open box cars (unlike the shipment of grain, which needs to be covered, whether it is transported in trucks or in railroad cars).  Therefore it comes as no surprise that sulphur prills are to be found on railroad tracks for miles along the tracks that carry loaded sulphur trains away from sulphur facilities.  The wind turbulence generated by open sulphur cars in motion blows sulphur prills out of the cars and onto the track and nearby land, an effect that:

a.) Causes a substantial portion of uncovered grain or sulphur that is being shipped to be lost,

b.) Increases exponentially with the speed of a transport vehicle, and

c.) Is known to every farmer involved in shipping grain and every railroad company involved in shipping sulphur. 

A tonne of grain is much more valuable and far less damaging to the environment than sulphur is.  Farmers cover the grain they ship.  On the other hand, it appears that sulphur is so cheap (it sells in the order of $30 to $60 a tonne) that it is not worth being covered in transit, provided that a shipper of sulphur prills doesn't care about contaminating the environment and is permitted to get away with that attitude.

As the next few photos show, sulphur prills do get blown out of open box cars in motion.   The quantity of sulphur that escapes into the environment by that route is substantial, even miles away from Shell's Shantz sulphur facility where the sulphur unit trains were loaded that spilled the sulphur where the photos were taken on October 24, 2005.

Spilled sulphur prills

Why is it that many people consider farmers to be dumb?  Farmers take measures to prevent the spilling of grain.  On the other hand, makers and shippers of sulphur prills are not bothered by spilled sulphur, they make the spilling of sulphur a part of the design of their shipping process.

8 km downstream from Shell's Shantz sulphur facility


Sulphur Prills On Railroad Track
8 km downstream from Shell's Shantz sulphur facility


Sulphur Prills On Railroad Track
8 km downstream from Shell's Shantz sulphur facility


Sulphur Prills On Railroad Track
8 km downstream from Shell's Shantz sulphur facility


Sulphur Prills On Railroad Track
8 km downstream from Shell's Shantz sulphur facility

Sulphur spilled in that manner negates to a considerable extent the well-intentioned prohibition of shipping crushed sulphur (that contains a large proportion of sulphur dust), although some people, such as the staff of HAZCO, do not consider the loss of sulphur prills in transit to be a problem.  After all, they insist that sulphur lost into the environment is harmless and poses no danger to anyone.  Moreover, they don't consider themselves to be responsible for sulphur lost in transit, as they own neither the sulphur nor the transportation facilities whose design permits sulphur to be lost in transit.

   Although Shell's Shantz facility (or the owners of the sulphur that is being formed there) must surely have received compensation payments for hundreds of thousands of tonnes of sulphur lost through train derailments (there were quite a few of those over the years), Reg Lambert of Shell's Shantz facility could not provide information on how many derailments there were.  He wrote that information on the number, dates and locations of train derailments involving sulphur shipped from Shantz would have to be obtained from the railroad companies.

   Provided that access to the required records is provided, it would be easy to determine the quantity of sulphur lost in transit.  One would merely have to subtract the volume of sulphur received at the intended destinations from the volume of sulphur shipped to those destinations.  Failing that, one could calculate an estimate of the transportation losses, based on a survey sample of the sulphur content of the soil on railroad right-of-ways and comparing the results of that survey to samples taken at control locations.  At any rate, going by what the preceding photos on this web page show, it is obvious that the losses through wind turbulence in transit alone must be substantial.

Transport regulations consider liquid sulphur to be a hazardous substance.  Shipments of solid sulphur by road are not considered to be dangerous to public health or the environment.  That is obviously an error, as is amply illustrated by the billion-dollar clean-up operation of a piece of real estate formerly used for loading sulphur onto ships in the heart of Vancouver. (See  Ottawa on the hook for billion-dollar clean-up of vacant land)

   Sulphur is insoluble in water, but in the presence of water and air it is readily converted through the action of all-pervasive thiobacilli into a number of harmful or obnoxious, even poisonous and deadly substances, amongst them primarily hydrogen sulphide, sulphur dioxide and sulphuric acid. 

   In the presence of iron, sulphur forms pyrites that can be self-igniting at ambient temperatures when exposed to air (such as in the case of the interface of sulphur cakes and the interior of vessels or tanker cars when those sulphur cakes fall off and the iron-sulphur interface becomes exposed to air).
   Moreover, as Burlington Industries' product information for solid and liquid sulphur shows, sulphur must not come into contact with oxidizing agents (sodium chlorate, a strong oxidizing agent, is being produced at the plant right across the road from the proposed HAZCO sulphur facility), halogens, mineral acids/alkalies, zinc, tin, and copper.  According to the staff at Shell's Shantz sulphur facility, sulphur in the environment harms printed circuit boards in computer equipment and cell phones, although they stated that they found and designed measures whereby such equipment can be protected to some extent from such harm. 

   It stands to reason that sulphur in the vicinity of the proposed HAZCO sulphur facility for Lamont County will pose that hazard, in addition to having a destructive impact on all galvanized steel, such as fence wire, metal roofing, metallized paints (e.g.: car paint) and steel granaries, in the vicinity of the site.  From our experiences with electric wire fencing in our sheep operation, acid rain at our farm over the years caused the fence wires to become coated with a thin insulating layer that made the electric fencing much and increasingly less effective for keeping sheep in and predators out.

   Escalating the concentration and frequency of acid rain through the amplification factor posed by the frequent temperature inversions so typical of the proposed HAZCO site and its vicinity in Lamont County, especially during the cool and cold seasons, will quite likely make the interaction of sulphur-caused agents with fence wires and other galvanized metals much more serious and gravely destructive.  After all, temperature inversions will cause obnoxious emissions to be amplified by a factor of a hundred or more, compared to what can be measured at the "Lamont" monitoring station that is well away from and above the inversion layer that will trap and concentrate harmful particles and gases suspended in the fogs that often cover the proposed HAZCO site and the area surrounding it.

Next Page: Unsold "Excess Sulphur" at Syncrude in Fort McMurray

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Posted March 12, 2006
Updates:
2006 03 17 (reformated this page to make it more printer-friendly, added information on environmental impact and other hazards posed by sulphur blocks, sulphur spills, sulphur processing sites, etc., and made various minor edits)
2006 03 21 (page broken up into five pages, to reduce required loading time
2006 10 16 (reformated)