My last post mentioned the USSR collapse. One of the longer term consequences has been this Ukraine war. Currently, there have been problems of shelling of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, and this appears to have happened in that our TV news has shown some of the smashed concrete, etc. The net result is the plant has shut down. Each side accuses the other of doing the shelling, but it seems to me that it had to be the Ukrainians. Russia has troops there, and no military command is going to put up with his side shelling his own troops. However, that is far from the total bad news. So far, Ukraine has been terribly lucky, but such luck cannot last indefinitely. There are consequences outside the actual war itself. The following is a summary of some of what was listed in the August edition of Chemistry World.
The Donbas area is Ukraine’s heavy industry area, and this includes the chemical industry. Recently, Russian air strikes at Sieverierodonetsk hit a nitric acid plant, and we saw images of the nitrogen dioxide gas spewing into the atmosphere.
Apparently, in 2017 Ukrainian shelling was around a chemical plant that contained 7 tonne of chlorine. Had a shell hit a critical tank, that would have been rather awkward. Right now, in the eastern Donbas there is a pipeline almost 700 km long that pipes ammonia. There are approximately 1.5 million people in danger from that pipeline should it burst; exactly how many depends on where it is broken. There are also just under 200,000 t of hazardous waste stored in various places. The question now is, with all this mess generated, in addition to demolished buildings and infrastructure, who will pay what to clean it up? It may or may not be fine for Western countries to use their taxes to produce weapons to give to Ukraine, but cleaning up the mess requires the money to go to Ukraine, not armament-making corporations at home.
The separation of the Donbas has led to many mines being closed, and these have filled with water. This has allowed mercury and sulphuric acid to be leached and then enter the water table. During 2019, a survey of industrial waste was made, and Ukraine apparently stores over 5.4 billion t of industrial waste, about half of which is in the Donbas. Ukraine has presumably inherited a certain amount, together with some of the attitudes, from the old Soviet Union. From experience, their attitude to environmental protection was not their strong point. I recall one very warm sunny morning going for a walk around Tashkent. I turned a corner and saw rather a lot of rusty buildings, and also, unbelievably, a cloud. How could water droplets form during such a warm dry climate? The answer was fairly clear when I got closer. One slight whiff, and I knew what it was: the building was emitting hydrogen chloride into the atmosphere and the hydrochloric acid droplets were the reason for the rust.
Meanwhile, some more glum news. We all know that the sanctions in response to the Ukraine war has led to a gas shortage. What most people will not realize is what this is doing to the chemical industry. The problem for the chemical industry is that unlike most other industries, other than the very sophisticated, the chemical industry is extremely entangled and interlinked. A given company may make a very large amount of chemical A, which is then sold as a raw material to a number of other companies, who in turn may do the same thing. There are many different factories dependent on the same raw chemical and the material in a given chemical available to the public may have gone through several different steps in several different factories.
An important raw mixture is synthesis gas, which is a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The hydrogen may be separated and used in steps to make a variety of chemicals, such as ammonia, the base chemical for just about all nitrogen fertilizer, as well as a number of other uses. The synthesis gas is made by heating a mixture of methane gas and water. Further, almost all chemical processing requires heat, and by far the bulk of the heat is produced by burning gas. In Europe, the German government is asking people to cut back on gas usage. Domestic heating can survive simply by lowering the temperature, although how far down one is prepared to go during winter is another question. However, the chemical industry is not so easily handled. Many factories use multiple streams, and it is a simple matter to shut down such a stream, but you cannot easily reduce the amounts going through a stream because the reactions are highly dependent on pressure, and the plant is in a delicate balance between amount processed and heat generated. A production unit is really only designed to operate one way, and that is continuously with a specific production rate. If you close it down, it may take a week to get it started again, to get the temperature gradients right. One possibility is the complete shutdown of the BASF plant at Ludwigshafen, the biggest chemical complex in the world. The German chemical industry uses about 135 TWhr of gas, or about 15% of the total in the country. The price of such gas has risen by up to a factor of eight since Russia was sanctioned, and more price rises are likely. That means companies have to try to pass on costs, but if they face international competition, that may not be possible. This war has consequences far beyond Ukraine.
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