The Behavior of Buoyant Merging Plumes in The Rocky Mountain Foothills

Natural gas often contains high concentrations of hydrogen sulfide which must be removed before the gas can be transmitted by pipeline. Sour gas plants extract the sulfur, by converting it to elemental sulfur through a modified Claus process. The sulfur recovery is 93% for small plants (10–100 tonnes of sulfur per day) to 99% for large plants (1000–4000 tonnes of sulfur per day). The unrecovered sulfur is Incinerated giving rise to relatively small emissions of SO₂ characterized by high buoyancy and low momentum.

Using a unique aerial probing methodology, plume dispersion studies were conducted on two plants located fn the foothills of southwestern Alberta, Canada. These studies were generally conducted under neutral conditions and with westerly air flows typical of Chinook conditions. Notable variations of the plume dispersion parameters from accepted predictive values were found, indicating that such values cannot be used with confidence to estimate plume rise and dispersion in the mountain foothills.