Purification of industrial gas streams from extremely toxic hydrogen sulfide, H2S begins with the process of its extraction in the absorbers with the liquid solvent to the required sanitary standards of gas to be cleaned. Then H2S enriched solutions of the absorbers are directed to the regeneration, where hydrogen sulfide is removed from solution and further utilized by the Claus method resulting in the final products to be water and solid sulfur.
Our main idea is that, after the first stage of H2S extraction from gas streams, the solutions enriched in H2S are passed through the solid catalyst at ambient temperature. So, at the outlet of catalyst bed the target product – hydrogen is obtained, while the second reaction product – elemental sulfur is accumulated in the solution. Conversion of H2S ranges up to 99.6 %. jsulfchem-2016-37-2-229-startsev
The proposed invention can be easily adapted to the existing industrial technologies of H2S utilization. The implementation of this method on an industrial scale actually means the gradual change of the existing technologies for hydrogen sulfide disposal by the Claus method for a new mode of operation, when the high-temperature, metal – and energy-intensive and expensive recycling processes will be replaced with the low-temperature catalytic H2S decomposition to obtain the target product – hydrogen.
The simplest method for disposal of the second product of H2S decomposition – diatomic gaseous sulfur jcce-2013-7-1007-startsev; kincat-2016-57-4-511-startsev, may be its catalytic oxidation in the mild conditions to sulfuric acid. Besides, diatomic gaseous sulfur can be used for the synthesis of new chemical sulfur compounds, fine chemicals and composite materials for various applications in agriculture, in rubber industry, for production of dyestuffs, industrial and road construction, etc.
Hydrogen produced in the catalytic decomposition of hydrogen sulfide seems to be quite competed in cost with the industrial methods of hydrogen production from the fossil hydrocarbon feedstock. In this case, an additional three topical issues can be resolved: 1 – utilization of highly toxic hydrogen sulfide, 2 – elimination of CO2 emissions to solve the problem of global warming, 3 – the gaseous sulfur can be used for the synthesis of new or known sulfur-containing materials of various functional purposes.
