Where does sulphur come from?
Sulphur occurs naturally in the environment and is the thirteenth most abundant element in the earth’s crust. It can be mined in its elemental form, although this method has declined over the last decade to less than 2% of world production. Most elemental sulphur is obtained as a co-product recovered from oil and gas production.
Sulphur is one of the chemical elements of the earth’s crust. Peop1e have known about it for many centuries, and ages ago the yellow, powdery rock was taken from mines in sicily. It was also mined long ago in Mexico and Japan. All these deposits of sulphur were formed in the seething upheavals of volcanic eruptions. Not so long ago massive deposits of sulphur were found in the United States. They are layers 200 feet thick called sulphur domes, and these deposits of almost pure sulphur were not formed by volcanoes. They occur along the gulf coast of Texas and Louisiana, and for a long time the experts thought that these valuable deposits could never be used. For they are buried below some 500 feet of tricky quicksand. But clever miners at last found a way to bring the ye11ow mineral to the surface, and these deep domes now supply most of the world’s sulphur.
