Catalyst Refiners Stopped Refining
The federal safety board's August 13 update fixed a capacity date nobody had published: the West Virginia plant that reclaimed silver from spent ethylene oxide catalyst had already ceased operations before the accident that made it news. Silver averaged 34% more last year than the year before, and scrap is now about half of everything US refiners turn out. That combination is why the reclaim clause in your catalyst agreement is worth reading again this week.
Catalyst Refiners, Inc. was not refining catalyst on the morning of April 22.
The US Chemical Safety Board put that on the record on August 13, in an update on its investigation of the hydrogen sulfide release at the company's Institute, West Virginia site. At the time of the release, the Board writes, "Catalyst Refiners had ceased silver reclamation operations and was decommissioning the facility."
The wastewater pretreatment system was still running.
Two employees died in that release and four others were seriously injured. The investigation is open, and cause is the Board's to determine.
The capacity fact sitting underneath it is ours. A US plant whose business was pulling silver back out of spent ethylene oxide catalyst had already gone quiet, and the date only became public four months later, in a safety document.
"When a silver reclaimer goes quiet, what happens to the credit that used to come back with your spent charge?"
What Institute did
The Board describes the site in one sentence. It "conducted silver and ethylene oxide catalyst refining operations," and it "reclaimed silver from spent catalyst and manufactured silver oxide."
That is the back half of the EO catalyst cycle, the part that never shows up in a capacity table because nobody publishes tonnes for it.
Ames Goldsmith Corp., the parent, said on the day of the release that the plant was set to close in June and that workers had been told about the closure several months earlier. So the decision predates April, and the accident happened inside the decommissioning rather than inside production.
The Board's list of what it is still examining reads like a decommissioning checklist: chemical incompatibilities, disposal procedures, personal protective equipment practices, corporate oversight. It has already established that there were no written disposal procedures for the chemicals involved and no personal gas monitors, and that workers believed respirators were unnecessary once production had stopped.
Roughly 80 gallons of a calcium chloride coagulant and 275 gallons of a sodium trithiocarbonate precipitant went into a wastewater receiving tank, followed by diluted nitric acid from a tote.
A sulfur-bearing precipitant met acid. Everything after that was chemistry.
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