NEWS RELEASE                                                                                                    OCTOBER 2014

Industrial Scrubber System Revenues to Exceed $8 Billion In 2019

Industrial plants will be spending more than $8 billion annually for scrubber systems by 2019.  This is the conclusion reached by the McIlvaine Company in Scrubber/Adsorber/Biofilter World Markets.

Scrubber Revenues ($ Millions)

These forecasts include applications in the iron and steel, refining, chemical, food, petrochemical, non ferrous metals, pharmaceutical industries to remove particulate and gases from stack discharges. They do not include scrubbers used on coal-fired boilers.  One reason is that the coal-fired boiler market is as large as the scrubber market in all other industries. This market is the subject of another McIlvaine report.

A third market is developing which will also need to be separately evaluated. This is the coal gasification and liquefaction market.  Scrubbers are used in clean up of the gas produced in the indirect gasification processes.  This market is potentially going to be bigger than either the industrial scrubber or power plant scrubber market.

There are less than100,000 MW of power plant scrubbers sold for new and retrofit applications each year. At $100,000-$200,000 MW this is an annual market of $10 billion to $20 billion.  These scrubbers are cleaning up plants which burn 300 million tons of coal per year.

Coal gasification requires even more investment in scrubbers per ton of coal processed. China is planning to convert 1.5 billion tons of coal per year into synfuels and clean gas, fuels and chemicals.  Other nations are also following this path.  Posco in South Korea is installing a coal gasifier in its steel mill and has set up a joint venture to build gasifiers elsewhere.  India and Indonesia have substantial coal reserves and are initiating projects. Australia has canceled its carbon tax and is actively developing underground gasification.  The U.K. could potentially use the underground coal gasification technology to utilize coal reserves in the North Sea.  CO₂ could be re-injected into the dwindling oil reserves in the area and, thus, also boost oil output.

With this level of activity it is very likely that the coal gasification scrubber market will be more than $10 billion per year at a peak period a few years from now.

This large market will be temporarily covered in the industrial scrubber market report. More information on this is found at: N008 Scrubber/Adsorber/Biofilter World Markets.

Information on the power plant scrubbers is found at: N027 FGD Market and Strategies