BUSINESS
TANKED UP
Then came the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Suddenly, plants making or storing chlorine and other hazardous chemicals were seen as potential terrorist targets. Critics ranging from environmental activists to security experts warned about the risks of shipping unguarded railcars of chlorine around the country. Such fears were compounded early this year when insurgents in Iraq began rigging cylinders of chlorine with explosives to turn them into chemical weapons. In April, the Department of Homeland Security released regulations intended to secure high-risk industrial facilities against sabotage or attacks. It followed up last month with a list of some 300 chemicals of particular interest. Chlorine is on the list, but sodium hypochlorite is not. The rules don’t restrict the production or use of chlorine or other hazardous chemicals, but they do require facilities that make them to implement a raft of site security measures. “They are pretty onerous in terms of cost and security,” notes Brad Davidson, executive vice president of KA Steel Chemicals, a major Midwestern manufacturer of bleach.
J C I J ONES C HEM I CA LS
This Torrance, Calif., facility is one of 11 from which JCI distributes chlorine and bleach.
KEEPING WATER PURE Favored for security reasons, bleach is a rising star in the WATER TREATMENT market MICHAEL MCCOY, C&EN NORTHEAST NEWS BUREAU
BLEACH IS SAFER than chlorine, but bleach is also made from chlorine. In an America fixated on homeland security, these are two chemical realities with big implications. Together, they are sparking a jump in demand for industrial-strength bleach and a marketplace battle over the right technology for manufacturing it. Industry uses bleach, or sodium hypochlorite, for the same purposes that home and apartment dwellers do: to whiten and disinfect. Although bleach has myriad industrial applications, its largest commercial use is treating water, either municipal drinking water or wastewater from cities and factories. Chlorine is both a raw material for making bleach and bleach’s main competitor for disinfecting drinking water. Chlorine is also a poisonous gas that must be shipped under pressure in specially designed tanks or cylinders. According to one bleach company, 16,000 railcars of chlorine cross the U.S. and Canada every year to serve water treatment, household bleach, and other industrial applications. But when chlorine reacts with sodium hydroxide, the result is a more benign solution of sodium hypochlorite. The product is sold to consumers by the plastic bottle in a 5–6% solution and to industrial users by the truckload in a 12–15% solution. According to the market research firm SRI Consulting, more than 80 bleach manufacturing plants are scattered about
the country, serving water treatment facilities and commercial customers that range from swimming pool operators to laundries to paper mills. The plants consume roughly 325,000 tons of chlorine annually in the production of close to 1 billion gal of bleach, SRI reports. Jeff Jones, president of JCI Jones Chemicals, oversees 11 of these bleach plants and has been watching the business slowly blossom. Family-owned for four generations, his company is one of the country’s largest providers of bleach and chlorine to municipal water treatment facilities. The two chemicals have long coexisted in the municipal water market. About 60% of the water treatment facilities responding to a recent survey by several water sector associations reported that they use chlorine gas for disinfection, while 40% said they use other techniques. As Jones explains, bleach is easy to handle, but it is mostly water and must be shipped in high volumes. Chlorine is hazardous, but it is concentrated and extremely effective. For many years, JCI and other suppliers witnessed only a modest amount of defection from chlorine to bleach.
MUNICIPAL WATER and wastewater treat-
ment plants aren’t subject to the new regulations because they are already regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency. However, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff has warned operators of such facilities that they face severe consequences for ignoring potential terrorist threats. Long before the new regulations, municipal water treatment officials had been reconsidering their use of chlorine, and a few moved to using bleach. A 2006 report by the Center for American Progress, a leftleaning think tank, found that 174 wastewater facilities and drinking water plants across the country had switched from chlorine gas to bleach as a water-treatment chemical since 1999, when a federal risk management planning program went into effect.
“We haven’t seen a massive exodus from chlorine yet, but we certainly believe it is going to happen.” WWW.C E N- ONLI NE .ORG
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chlorine. They predict that bleach will gradually replace chlorine in water treatment as pressure mounts to stop transporting and storing chlorine, particularly in populated areas. They also argue that shipping chlorine to bleach plants and storing it on-site is an outmoded practice that can be eliminated with the new technology. Perhaps the most strident of these
FOR COMPANIES like Olin and JCI that
manufacture or distribute chlorine, the expanding bleach market is a business opportunity—but one that they pursue alongside their traditional chlorine operations. After all, JCI’s Jones says he expects chlorine to continue being used for years to come. Most newcomers to the bleach game, however, plan to install a relatively new allin-one technology that makes bleach from salt and eliminates the need to buy and store WWW.C E N- ONLI NE .ORG
companies is K2 Pure Solutions, a Canadian firm formed by David Cynamon and Howard Brodie, founders of KIK Custom Products, North America’s largest contract manufacturer of private label household bleach. The company declined to be interviewed by C&EN, but its website says its goal is to “eliminate the need to transport and store deadly chlorine.”
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Examples cited in the report range from the high-profile Blue Plains Wastewater Treatment Plant in Washington, D.C., which switched to bleach soon after the 2001 attacks, to five small drinking water plants in Jacksonville, Fla. Yet the group also found that some 1,150 wastewater facilities and 1,700 drinking water utilities were still using hazardous chemicals, primarily chlorine. For bleach companies, those remaining chlorine users are a market opportunity. “We haven’t seen a massive exodus from chlorine yet,” says KA Steel’s Davidson, “but we certainly believe it is going to happen.” Anticipating a declining market, his company exited the chlorine distribution business in the late 1990s. Olin Corp., the third-largest U.S. chlorine producer, also sees opportunity in the bleach market. The company says it is now the country’s largest industrial bleach maker following its early 2007 acquisition of rival Pioneer and the expansion of several of its existing bleach plants. In July 2006, Olin embarked on a $11.8 million plan to double bleach output across plants in Augusta, Ga.; Charleston, Tenn.; McIntosh, Ala.; and Niagara Falls, N.Y. The Niagara Falls project, for example, tripled bleach capacity there with the installation of a continuous bleach production system. Then, in September of this year, Olin signed a tentative agreement to become a partner in a bleach plant recently constructed in Hamlet, N.C., by Trinity Manufacturing, a regional producer of bleach and other chemicals. In addition, Olin says it is pursuing other opportunities in the bleach market, including a railcar design for shipping by train, rather than truck, and manufacturing technologies that would allow the product to be shipped at higher concentrations. “This has become an important strategic business to Olin and one in which we intend to become a leader,” says Ken Morgan, Olin’s director of marketing for coproducts.
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K2’s solution is a North America-wide network of facilities utilizing what the company calls inherently safe technology. Like the plants being proposed by other bleach newcomers, they are singlesite plants in which sodium chloride is electrolytically split into chlorine and caustic soda, then immediately converted into bleach and hydrochloric acid with little accumulation of free chlorine. Observers say the technology is used by only a handful of bleach facilities in the U.S. today. So far, K2 has announced plans for two facilities, one in the Los Angeles area in cooperation with the chemical distributor Basic Chemical Solutions, and one in the Midwest in partnership with KA Steel. Davidson says plant site selection is ongoing in the Chicago area and that preliminary engineering is being conducted. He explains that KA Steel’s existing bleach facilities could meet increases in demand from customers, but that the K2 approach is a better and inherently safer way to generate bleach. “It’s newer, it’s safer, it’s more efficient, and it will be more cost-effective over the long haul,” he says.
THE BLEACH TWO-STEP Getting to chlorine is the energy-intensive part of making bleach. 2 NaCl + 2 H2O
Electrolysis
Cl2 + 2 NaOH + H2
Chlorine
Salt solution
Sodium hydroxide
H2O + NaCl + NaOCl Bleach
K2 and its partners aren’t the only companies betting on this proposition. Their plants are just two of several new-technology bleach facilities that have been announced or built around the country in the past two years. Another is the Trinity plant that opened in North Carolina in September. Trinity, which has manufactured bleach for more than a decade using purchased chlorine and caustic soda, now says it will be able to eliminate supply-chain interruptions and price fluctuations. “This plant has been designed so it can be expanded quickly,” says Chuck Davis, the company’s vice president of sales and marketing. IN AUGUST, a new affiliate of the Indianapolis-based chemical
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distributor Harris & Ford said it would build a plant at Cargill’s Eddyville, Iowa, grain processing complex that makes chlorine and caustic soda and converts them immediately to either bleach or hydrochloric acid. Scheduled to open in 2009 at a cost of $68 million, the plant would serve Cargill and other regional customers. Likewise, in March 2006, a new company called NaClor said it would build a $40 million facility in Indianapolis designed to convert salt into bleach, caustic soda, and hydrochloric acid. It billed the plant as the largest of its type in the U.S. and said it would “eliminate the potential environmental risk factors associated with the transportation of chlorine.” An early adopter of the new bleach-making approach was Cleveland-based BleachTech. Conceived in 2001 by partners Tim Maegly and Richard Immerman, BleachTech opened its first plant, in Seville, Ohio, in 2003. It is building a similar facility in Petersburg, Va., and has purchased land in Peru, Ill., for its third plant. WWW.C E N- ONLI NE .ORG
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BUSINESS
S HU TTERSTOC K
Fort Washington, Pa.-based Severn Trent Services. Its ClorTec generators use onboard electrolytic cells to turn brine into a 0.8% bleach solution. The company claims to have installed more such systems in the U.S. than any other firm and says they typically provide a return on investment within three to five years. The bleach market is expanding, but
Maegly cautions that it may not be expanding fast enough to accommodate all the investment in new production capacity. At longtime player JCI, Jones is aware of the growing competition, but he is taking it in stride. “If we are in a particular business and everyone else is scrambling to get into it, it must be a pretty good business,” he says. ■
Maegly, who used to work for a traditional bleach maker, says his company differs from other players in that it designs, builds, and operates its own plants. In addition, unlike some of the others, he says BleachTech isn’t betting against chlorine. “Chlorine is involved in 40% of the country’s economy,” he says. “It’s just not going to go away.” Although Maegly sees continued market growth as more chlorine users switch to bleach, he contends that the newcomers are overestimating the sentiment against chlorine and underestimating the costs of operating one of the new facilities. “These plants are expensive and they are difficult to run. You can have a major malfunction in a matter of hours,” he points out.
PURE FLOW
Most municipalities use chlorine or bleach to disinfect drinking water.
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A NUMBER of new-technology bleach plants have been announced with great fanfare, only to be quietly withdrawn, Maegly says. He predicts that other projects will also go by the wayside when their backers take a closer look at the true costs involved in running them. And Maegly points out that both the traditional bleach companies and the new salt-based manufacturers face competition from yet another approach: bleach generated at the water treatment plant by skidmounted machines that are like miniature versions of the industrial-scale facilities BleachTech and K2 are building. Indeed, some of the water utilities highlighted in the Center for American Progress report switched from using trucked-in chlorine to this kind of on-site generated bleach. Examples include the Yorba Linda Water District in California and the La Vergne Water Treatment Plant in Tennessee. One source of these bleach generators is WWW.C E N- ONLI NE .ORG
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