Sulfur, liquid, to the sulfur pit

Activity Sulfur recovery from acid gas by the modified Claus process with a catalytic oxidation tail gas unit, RER: the inventory of 1 kilogram of its reference product, attributional, cut-off.

Calculation maturity: not assessed Design maturity: Concept (research)Not independently reviewedsulfur-recovery-1:sulfur-claus-catalytic-oxidation-tgtu:product:sulfurPreliminaryReport a problem with this dataset

Research outputAn inventory from a research design at the design maturity its process states, not verified plant data: check its calculation maturity and review status before use. Background activities are referenced by name only; no background data is included. All caveats

What it is

Per 1 t of liquid sulfur, gate-to-gate, EU refinery SRUs of the REF BREF data collection. H2S of an amine acid gas in; steam exported as a co-product; tail gas incinerated. Recovery, fuel, electricity, steam and cooling water from the BREF; NOx, CO and hydrocarbons from US EPA AP-42.

Reference product: 1 kilogram of Sulfur, liquid, to the sulfur pit
CAS: not available
Code: sulfur-recovery-1:sulfur-claus-catalytic-oxidation-tgtu:product:sulfur
Dataset: sulfur-claus-catalytic-oxidation-tgtu version 0.1.0 · UUID 6a04e227-e89c-5fb8-97f3-c3b963fa80f6
Activity UUID: not available (the library assigns none; use the code)
Database: cheme-as-code-atlas-preview-a3c52e4 (version preview-a3c52e4)
Process: Sulfur recovery from acid gas by the modified Claus process with a catalytic oxidation tail gas unit
Geography: RER · background inputs with a site rule link at the user's site location (default DE)
Time period: 2004 · valid until 2015
Technology: modified Claus (thermal stage and two to three catalytic stages) with a catalytic direct oxidation tail gas unit (SuperClaus type) and thermal incineration; amine-based and sub-dew-point tail gas units and oxygen enrichment are not modelled · level current
Boundary: gate-to-gate: Claus furnace and waste heat boiler, catalytic converters and condensers, selective-oxidation tail gas stage, incinerator, sulfur pit; acid gas, fuel, power and boiler feed water from outside
Classification: ISIC Rev.4 2011 (taxonomy/families.yaml (ISIC Rev.4) of the process's families)
System model: attributional, cut-off (docs/system-model.md, methodology 1.1.0)
Allocation: shares, 100 % of the dataset to this product (rule deviation, from dataset)
The library hierarchy allocates exported steam by energy or exergy (docs/system-model.md section 2). Neither can be computed here: the source states no steam pressure, so the steam's exergy and enthalpy are unknown, and the registry has no exergy or heating value of sulfur. The steam is a by-product of a unit whose purpose is H2S abatement; shares 1/0 are the conservative choice for the sulfur until the steam state is sourced.
Rights: CC-BY-4.0

Exchanges per 1 kilogram of Sulfur, liquid, to the sulfur pit

As exported: allocated and scaled to the reference product. Provenance: 6 calculated, 1 assumed, 4 given. Pedigree scores (1 best, 5 worst): reliability, completeness, temporal correlation, geographical correlation, further technological correlation.

Preliminary1 exchange is not yet linked to a background dataset. It counts no burden, so the inventory is incomplete: do not read a result from it as complete.

Input	Amount	Unit	Provenance	Pedigree	Linked to
Hydrogen sulfide in the acid gas (from amine regeneration) feed:hydrogen-sulfide sulfur balance with the sourced recovery efficiency: every S atom of the feed leaves as sulfur or as SO2. Only the H2S is counted: CO2, NH3 (sour water stripper gas), water and hydrocarbons of a real acid gas are left out (system_boundary)	1.079	kilogram	calculated	4 4 4 4 4	unlinked unlinked, no technosphere mapping: no mapping (chemical 'hydrogen-sulfide'); add it to lci/mappings.yaml technosphere or to the process's lca/mappings.yaml exchanges
Natural gas (as methane) to the burners and the incinerator feed:natural-gas EU JRC (2015) REF BREF, EUR 27140 EN, doi:10.2791/010758, 4.23.5.2.1, Table 4.85, p. 485 (fuel in MJ/t), over the LHV of methane fuel, LHV 50.01 MJ/kg	0.02599	kilogram	calculated	3 4 4 3 3	Atlas: natural gas, per kg, as methane (Atlas unit proxy) (natural gas, by mass, GLO)
Boiler feed water for the steam raised feed:boiler-feed-water ASSUMED equal to the steam produced (blowdown not counted). TODO blowdown	1.75	kilogram	assumed	4 4 4 4 4	market for water, deionised (water, deionised, RoW) in your background (default ecoinvent-3.11-cutoff)
Electricity feed:electricity EU JRC (2015) REF BREF, EUR 27140 EN, doi:10.2791/010758, 4.23.5.2.1, Table 4.85, p. 485 electricity	0.0675	kilowatt hour	given	3 4 4 3 3	market for electricity, medium voltage (electricity, medium voltage, DE, site location) in your background (default ecoinvent-3.11-cutoff)
Heat to cooling water output:heat-rejected EU JRC (2015) REF BREF, EUR 27140 EN, doi:10.2791/010758, 4.23.5.2.1, Table 4.85, p. 485 (m3/t at a 10 K rise), converted to heat cold, 25 degC	0.1163	kilowatt hour	calculated	3 4 4 3 3	Atlas (plant): cooling water service, per kWh heat rejected (Atlas screening proxy) (heat rejected to cooling water, GLO) compatible: grade the input names cooling-water only; cooling-water (Heat rejected to cooling water, 25/35 degC) is taken; unit kilowatt hour; carrier cold, 25 degC from cold, 25 degC; system model cutoff (one database); allocation mass (single-output); boundary plant gate of a site utility: no utility market yet (docs/markets.md)

Elementary flows

Flow	Direction	Compartment	Amount	Unit	Provenance	Pedigree
Sulfur dioxide fd7aa71c-508c-480d-81a6-8052aad92646	emission	air	0.03043	kilogram	calculated	3 4 4 3 3
Water 075e433b-4be4-448e-9510-9a5029c1ce94	emission	air	6.289e-4	cubic meter	calculated	4 4 4 4 4
Carbon dioxide, fossil 349b29d1-3e58-4c66-98b9-9d1a076efd2e	emission	air	0.07131	kilogram	calculated	3 4 4 3 3
Nitrogen oxides c1b91234-6f24-417b-8309-46111d09c457	emission	air	1.1e-4	kilogram	given	3 4 4 4 3
Carbon monoxide, fossil ba2f3f82-c93a-47a5-822a-37ec97495275	emission	air	6.5e-4	kilogram	given	3 4 4 4 3
NMVOC, non-methane volatile organic compounds d3260d0e-8203-4cbb-a45a-6a13131a5108	emission	air	2e-5	kilogram	given	3 4 4 4 3

Where these numbers come from: each exchange names its source above; the dataset is processes/sulfur-recovery-1/lca/datasets/sulfur-claus-catalytic-oxidation-tgtu.yaml in library version a3c52e4.

Used by

No other activity of this database links to it.

How good it is

Review: Not reviewed: no LCI review record yet
Data quality: not available
Mass and carbon closure: Not available: a hand-written dataset: no lca/manifest.json records its balance
Change report: Not available: this build has no change report against an earlier release.

KPI benchmark positions

KPI	Value	Reference range	Position
Electricity per t of sulfur recovered No open source independent of the dataset found (2026-11-05). The only open figure read is the REF BREF's 60 to 75 kWh/t for a 20 000 t/yr SRU (section 4.23.5.2.1, Table 4.85, p. 485), and the dataset takes its midpoint from that table, so binding it would only check the transcription. Read without a usable figure: US EPA AP-42 section 8.13 (no utilities), the REF BREF Table 3.88 site example (fuel only). Not readable: the JEAS Claus/THIOPAQ comparison doi:10.1186/s44147-023-00356-9 (download blocked; a search result shows only a plant-level 0.8 MW without the sulfur throughput).	– kWh/t	not available	not evaluated
NOx (as NO2) to air per t of sulfur recovered	– kg/t	0.58 to 0.58 kg/t Barthe, P., Chaugny, M., Roudier, S., Delgado Sancho, L. (2015) Best Available Techniques (BAT) Reference Document for the Refining of Mineral Oil and Gas. JRC Science and Policy Report EUR 27140 EN, doi:10.2791/010758 (bref)	not evaluated
Steam produced per t of sulfur recovered No open source independent of the dataset found (2026-11-05). The REF BREF's 1500 to 2000 kg/t (section 4.23.5.2.1, Table 4.85, p. 485) is the dataset's own source. AP-42 section 8.13.2 (p. 8.13-1) says only that the waste heat boiler raises high- to medium-pressure steam and that about 80 % of the heat released could be recovered, with no amount per t. As a plausibility check only (not a range): the overall Claus reaction releases about 6.9 GJ per t of sulfur (H2S(g) + 1/2 O2 to S + H2O(g), standard enthalpies of formation), so 80 % of it raises at most roughly 2.4 t of steam per t (about 2.3 GJ per t of steam from boiler feed water), a rough upper bound that the dataset's 1.75 t/t stays below.	– t/t	not available	not evaluated
Sulfur recovery efficiency of a sulfur recovery unit (S recovered per S in the H2S feed)	– %	99 to 99.9 % US EPA (2015) AP-42, Compilation of Air Pollutant Emission Factors, 5th ed., Vol. I, section 8.13 Sulfur Recovery (revision 4/15) (government)	not evaluated

How to use it

Downloads

cheme-as-code-atlas-preview-a3c52e4.xlsx · bw2io ExcelImporter workbook (bw2io 0.9 Excel layout) · the whole database
code sulfur-recovery-1:sulfur-claus-catalytic-oxidation-tgtu:product:sulfur
cheme-as-code-atlas-preview-a3c52e4-olca-jsonld.zip · openLCA JSON-LD (olca-schema) (2) · the whole database
process 6a04e227-e89c-5fb8-97f3-c3b963fa80f6 (processes/6a04e227-e89c-5fb8-97f3-c3b963fa80f6.json) · the dataset's unallocated multi-output process; this product's allocation factor is in it
cheme-as-code-atlas-preview-a3c52e4-multifunctional.json · Brightway 2.5 multifunctional database (JSON, for the multifunctional package) (cheme-as-code/lci-multifunctional/v1) · the whole database
code sulfur-recovery-1:sulfur-claus-catalytic-oxidation-tgtu · the dataset unallocated, with all its products; this product is its desired_code
cheme_as_code_lci-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl · the installer

A file with this activity alone is not available: each file above is the whole database, and the line under it says how to find this activity there.

import bw2data as bd
from cheme_as_code_lci import install

bd.projects.set_current("my-project")   # holds your licensed background + biosphere3
install("cheme-as-code-atlas-preview-a3c52e4.xlsx", background="ecoinvent-3.11-cutoff", location="DE")
activity = bd.get_activity(("cheme-as-code-atlas-preview-a3c52e4", "sulfur-recovery-1:sulfur-claus-catalytic-oxidation-tgtu:product:sulfur"))

While any exchange of the database has no mapping, install() writes nothing and only lists the unlinked exchanges. So the last line finds no activity until the gaps are mapped: the download section gives the ways to use the database now.

How to cite

Sulfur, liquid, to the sulfur pit, from Sulfur recovery from acid gas by the modified Claus process with a catalytic oxidation tail gas unit (dataset sulfur-claus-catalytic-oxidation-tgtu 0.1.0), ChemE-as-Code Process Atlas LCI database preview-a3c52e4, activity sulfur-recovery-1:sulfur-claus-catalytic-oxidation-tgtu:product:sulfur. Cite the Process Atlas paper (in preparation, 2026), by Artur M. Schweidtmann and Jana M. Weber, and the ChemE-as-Code Process Atlas LCI database version preview-a3c52e4.

DOI: none yet (the Process Atlas paper is in preparation)

For the data, cite the Process Atlas paper; for the platform that builds and checks it, the ChemE-as-Code paper.

Schweidtmann, A. M. & Weber, J. M. (2026, in preparation). Process Atlas: an open, git-native, reproducible library and life cycle inventory of chemical processes (working title).

BibTeX

@unpublished{schweidtmann_process_atlas,
  author = {Schweidtmann, Artur M. and Weber, Jana M.},
  title = {{Process Atlas: an open, git-native, reproducible library and life cycle inventory of chemical processes (working title)}},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://atlas.cheme-as-code.org},
  note = {in preparation}
}

Schweidtmann, A. M. (2026). ChemE-as-Code: An Open-Source Platform for Agentic AI in Chemical Engineering. arXiv:2611.07947. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2611.07947

BibTeX

@misc{schweidtmann_cheme_as_code,
  author = {Schweidtmann, Artur M.},
  title = {{ChemE-as-Code: An Open-Source Platform for Agentic AI in Chemical Engineering}},
  year = {2026},
  eprint = {2611.07947},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2611.07947},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07947}
}