Vital Caspian Graphics - Challenges Beyond Caviar

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of sulphur a year is used by industry, mostly in the form of sulphuric acid, but there is still an excess. From a peak of $180 a tonne in 1988, sulphur prices have dropped to $36 a tonne this year. To unload an additional 6 million tonnes on the market would mean the price would drop to near zero. But TCO has to do something. It has put in a $54m plant to process the sulphur into flakes for the Chinese fertiliser market and granules for the western market. The flakes are already being exported by rail to China and the granules will be heading west to Black Sea ports for European and American markets. At most TCO expects to be selling 3,000 tonnes a week next year, but even that vast quantity means the sulphur mountain will still be growing at 1,000 tonnes a week. Joel Adamson, whose task it is to address the issue, said: “We have to take a softly-softly approach. As it is, each tonne we sell makes a loss, simply because of the distances we have to transport it. To depress prices further makes no sense, so we are producing a high quality product at a very low price to try to corner the market. We hope prices will go back up, but in the meantime we hope to get an increasing market share so at least we can begin to reduce the size of the mountain.” Given the problem facing the existing field, a much larger offshore field nextdoor operated by Agip will not try to sell its sulphur - but neither will it create another mountain. Instead it plans to store millions of tonnes in underground chambers, thereby postponing the problem indefinitely.