Commodities: Booming Brimstone

Brimstone has been a hot commodity ever since it was used to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. Today the ocher-colored mineral is in greater demand than ever. This year’s free-world production of sulfur, as the stuff is commonly known, will amount to 15.6 million tons, a critical 300,000 tons short of needs. In the U.S., which accounts for more than 50% of the output, once vast stocks have shrunk to a 35-year low, leaving the nation with a bare 15-week supply.

The shortage has been reflected in higher prices, which have risen nearly 33% since 1964. And now there is even rationing of the disappearing element. Manhattan-based Freeport Sulphur Co., which is the world’s biggest producer (4,000,000 tons a year), has increased its output 70% over the past five years, but has had to limit its customers to 90% of their usual orders. Only two weeks ago, second-ranked Texas Gulf Sulphur (nearly 3,000,000 tons) began telling its buyers that they would have to settle for just 75% of their normal quotas during the next three months. It appears that the relatively sudden squeeze has caught almost everyone by surprise. “Like the toothpaste ads say,” comments one Commerce Department official, “we wonder where the yellow went.”

Phenomenal Popularity. Where it went is into just about everything that is manufactured or grown. In various forms, including sulfuric acid, the nation’s most widely used chemical, sulfur is used for such chores as tanning leather, cleaning steel, pigmenting paint, making plastic and paper. Mostly, the shortage is the result of sulfur’s phenomenal popularity down on the farm. Its use as a fertilizer ingredient has doubled since 1961, and agricultural needs now command nearly half of total production.

Sulfur producers are hard pressed to expand their sources in Texas, the U.S. Gulf Coast and Mexico, where the only minable deposits exist. Last year several companies rushed to pick up land leases in Texas’ Pecos County on the strength of a promising 1927 geological survey. Outside Houston, Texas Gulf Sulphur reopened its Old Gulf mine, a relic that the company had worked for 13 years before closing it in 1932 when it was thought to be no longer profitable. Freeport has turned to offshore deposits that were once considered prohibitively expensive. It has one Gulf of Mexico operation already under way, will start production in its new $25 million Caminada mine six miles off Louisiana early next year.

Other sources also seem promising. Increasing amounts of sulfur are being reclaimed from “sour” natural-gas pools in Canada and in France. Elcor Chemical Corp. of Midland, Texas, has hopes of gleaning sulfur from gypsum. And the U.S. Bureau of Mines, Monsanto Co. and others are hard at work to find ways of turning the old fire-and-brimstone villain into a new hero. Those pollutants that belch forth from factory smokestacks can, they insist, be scrubbed to yield a surprising amount of salable sulfur.