Sourced conceptual inventory per tonne of liquid sulfur from refinery acid gas: recovery, fuel, electricity, steam and cooling water from the EU REF BREF, incinerator NOx, CO and hydrocarbons from US EPA AP-42. Steam exported as a co-product. No flowsheet; not reviewed.
Sulfur recovery from acid gas by the modified Claus process with a catalytic oxidation tail gas unit
Sourced conceptual inventory per tonne of liquid sulfur from refinery acid gas: recovery, fuel, electricity, steam and cooling water from the EU REF BREF, incinerator NOx, CO and hydrocarbons from US EPA AP-42. Steam exported as a co-product. No flowsheet; not reviewed.
Research outputNot engineering advice and not an approved design: do not use it for construction, operation or safety decisions. What this means
Overview
- Capacity
- per tonne of sulfur (the dataset's basis); no plant size
What goes in and out
In
- Hydrogen sulfideFeedstockH2S of the amine acid gas; the other acid gas components are left out (dataset system_boundary)
- MethaneFeedstockfuel of the line burners and the incinerator, natural gas taken as methane (ASSUMED)
- AirFeedstockClaus furnace and incinerator air, free; its O2 is feed:O2
- WaterFeedstockboiler feed water, ASSUMED equal to the steam raised
Out
- SulfurMain productproduct:sulfur: liquid sulfur to the pit, dissolved H2S counted as sulfur. No inventory_key on purpose: with one, the LCI build would link the sulfur feeds of sulfuric-acid-1 and thionyl-chloride-1 to this plant gate (no sulfur market yet, and the H2S feed is still a gap), a change those processes decide in their own lca/mappings.yaml
- SteamCo-productproduct:steam: steam produced, 1.75 t/t, all taken as exported (ASSUMED), pressure not stated by the source; all burdens to the sulfur (dataset allocation)
- Carbon dioxideEmissionfuel combustion; acid gas CO2 left out
- Sulfur dioxideEmissionsulfur not recovered, burnt to SO2 in the incinerator
Utilities: Electricity, Cooling water (counted as heat rejected (kWh) at the source's 10 K rise)
Life cycle assessment
No footprint assessed yet; the process is part of the life-cycle inventory below.
In the open LCI database (cheme-as-code-atlas-preview-a3c52e4) as Sulfur, liquid, to the sulfur pit Preliminary.
Download it for Brightway, openLCA and other tools.
In the LCI database: system model, datasets and KPIs against the benchmarks
In the LCI database
- Status
- Preliminary 1 unmapped exchange. Some exchanges have no background mapping yet: they are exported unlinked and count no burden, so the inventory is incomplete.
- System model
- attributional, cut-off (methodology 1.1.0)
- Allocation
- shares (deviation, from dataset) · product:steam 0 %, product:sulfur 100 %
- Allocation findings
- none
- Change report
- Not available: this build has no change report against an earlier release.
- Dataset pages
- Sulfur, liquid, to the sulfur pit Preliminary
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 | 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 % | not evaluated |
Maturity and review
Design maturity Concept (claimed): An idea or first flowsheet; numbers are rough. No independent engineering review yet. Automated checks passing is not a review.
Calculation maturity, from the checked evidenceNot assessed
The process has no maturity report (cheme maturity, checks/maturity.json), so no calculation maturity is established.
No level shownThe design maturity (Concept) is the manifest's claim, not evidence. A level appears here once the process's repository holds a current report from
cheme maturity --write.Artifact completeness
Which deliverables exist. They never raise a calculation maturity level: a drawing from unchecked numbers is still unchecked.
Not reported without a maturity report.
Independent review
Not independently reviewed
No independent engineering review yet. Automated checks passing is not a review.
Set by people only. Reaching a calculation maturity level or passing automated checks is not an independent review or an approval.
Where the evidence comes from
- Report
processes/sulfur-recovery-1/checks/maturity.json(not in the library)- Method
- How ChemE-as-Code checks the levels (requirement by requirement)
Open items
0 open items · 0 closed
New action itemNew engineering holdNew technical queryNew design changeAll issues
Sources
- Library version
- a3c52e4 (process last changed in a3c52e4)
- Data
- Catalog record (JSON) · CC-BY-4.0
- Files
- View the files on GitHub · change history and authors
References
- 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 (JRC94879), sections 3.23.2, 4.23.5.2 and 5.17 · doi:10.2791/010758
- US EPA (2015) AP-42, Compilation of Air Pollutant Emission Factors, 5th ed., Vol. I, chapter 8.13 Sulfur Recovery (revision 4/15)
- U.S. Geological Survey (2024) Mineral Commodity Summaries 2024, Sulfur, pp. 172-173 (sources of recovered sulfur; route dominance)
How to cite
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).
For this process: "Sulfur recovery from acid gas by the modified Claus process with a catalytic oxidation tail gas unit", ChemE-as-Code process library, version a3c52e4.
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}
}