The largest purchasers of scrubbers include the pulp and paper, chemicals, metals, mining, waste incineration, refining, and wastewater industries, adds McIlvaine.
East Asia will be the biggest market with NAFTA a distant second. Currently, China is the largest producer of steel and scrubbers are used to capture the dust emitted from basic oxygen furnaces, electric arc furnaces, sinter plants, coke ovens and other emission sources. China produces almost as much cement as the rest of the world combined, and scrubbers are now starting to be applied to cement kilns to remove hydrogen chloride, SO2 and other acid gases.
Indonesia is a major pulp producer and many East Asian countries are expanding their pump capacity. East Asia is also the leading purchaser of scrubbers for semiconductor and flat panel applications and waste-to-energy is now the preferred choice for disposing of rubbish in East Asia.
NAFTA is the next largest segment, with substantial pulp and paper production in Canada and the US, where scrubbers are used on recovery furnaces, lime kilns and for H2S removal elsewhere in the processes. The new air toxic rules directed at the cement plants will require that scrubbers be installed at over 100 existing plants in the US. The total investment will approach US$1 billion.