Sulfur: At the Crossroads of Energy, the Environment and Agriculture
The success of the Clean Air Act has created evidence of sulfur deficiency on the farm, and a surplus sulfur stockpiles elsewhere. Hondo Chemical has shown that sulfur products derived from a particular process, the LO-CAT® process, produces sulfur-based agricultural products with superior results compared to products based on sulfur from more conventional sources, such as Claus plants.
Driven by the Clean Air Act and other similar local, state, federal, and even international legislation, industries around the world have searched for better ways to remove various sulfur byproducts from exhaust gases for the past 30 years. Numerous processes were developed to remove sulfur from both gas and liquid hydrocarbon streams, including the LO-CAT® process for gas streams, and THIOLEX™ and MERICAT™ processes for liquid streams. Ironically, these processes were so effective at removing sulfur compounds from exhaust gas streams that the agricultural industry, which previously attained almost all the sulfur it needed from the atmosphere via smokestacks and automobile exhaust, suddenly found itself desperately short of sulfur and experiencing crop losses due to sulfur nutrient deficiencies for the first time since the industrial revolution.