Application - Steel

Existing applications of primary ERC products include feedstock preservatives, de-icing solutions, and baking soda, to name a few. odium formate and formic acid currently have a market value of $2,200 per ton. More than 600,000 tp/year of formic acid is produced: BASF is the largest producer and world marketer. Formic acid has uses including the following: cleaning purposes, de-icing of planes and runways, as a precursor chemical in making agricultural and other finished chemicals. Sodium bicarbonate has a market value of $500 per ton.

Application - Fuel Additive

Diesel manufacturers in Europe and Japan are concerned with NOx emissions from diesel trucks and cars. A new fuel additive – ammonium formate – shows great promise and is being tested. It is likely to be adopted and would be a large market worldwide. The ERC process can be adapted to produce ammonium formate.

Market for formic acid in steel making

ERC’s primary purpose is to convert CO2, a waste product of burning fossil fuels and an environmental problem, into a valuable product, formic acid. But if the ERC process is both economic and successful it is likely to be widely accepted as a way for industry to deal with exhaust gas from power production; there then arises the danger of overproduction of formic acid, that is, in excess of market demand. (The current world market is modest – hundreds of thousands of tonnes annually1.) This would limit the value of the product and might act as a barrier to the wider spread of an otherwise valuable technology. So it is useful to anticipate the issue and look beyond the current market to ask if there are future applications that can take up a much larger volume of formic acid. This question quickly becomes: can the strongest of the organic acids (formic acid) replace the use of strong acids like hydrochloric (HCl acid) and sulfuric. Formic acid is much more environmental friendly.

The market discovered:

On investigation, there is an application in hot-rolled steel pickling (cleaning the oxidized surface of hot-rolled steel during the manufacturing process in a steel plant), this is one of the largest uses today of HCl acid 2. Formic acid is potentially more attractive in this application than HCl because:

1. It gives a better surface quality (HCl is an aggressive acid and can pit the steel).
2. Less iron is lost from the steel surface
3. Less rinse water is needed after pickling
4. A caustic rinse is necessary to neutralize the HCl; no neutralizing rinse is required with formic acid
5. Corrosion inhibitors are not required to reduce the amount of steel etching
6. HCl is so aggressive that the surrounding plant equipment gets corroded quickly; use of formic acid will result in a longer plant life
7. Formic acid is bio-degradable
8. Formic acid can be reconcentrated and reused from the aqueous spent solution, not HCl
9. Precipitated iron formate can be recycled back into the blast furnace to recover iron that was etched from the pickling operation
10. Process water can be recycled more easily.

ERC also produces O2 as a byproduct: the oxygen goes to the blast furnace where it will improve combustion.

There are other large scale industrial applications of formic acid that are being considered and investigated by Mantra, but until we have more information this is not the time to discuss these ideas.

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1 Formic acid world capacity is 620,000 t/a according to the China Chemical Reporter, June 16,
2006, author Yeli Li. The prime production method is by the light oil liquid-phase oxidation
method.

2 HCl production is estimated at 20 Mt/year according to Wikipedia. One of the biggest applications
is pickling of steel