Glasnost offers oil-and-gas dividend.

Russian physicists have designed and begun field testing a process for converting hydrogen sulfide -- a noxious waste from petroleum refining and gas processing -- into two marketable products. The process requires microwave generators of a size not yet available in the United States. But researchers at Argonne (Ill.) National Laboratory acknowledged last week that they are in the final stages of developing a pair of partnerships -- involving the technology's Russian developers -- to transfer this process to the U.S. market.

U.S. companies already market sulfur extracted from oil and gas tainted with high concentrations of hydrogen sulfide. However, the Russian process also recovers hydrogen, a valuable energy source. The new technology thus has the long-term potential to save U.S. oil refienrs some 40 to 70 trillion Btus of energy -- and up to $1 billion -- per year, assert John B.L. Harkness and Richard D. Doctor of Argonne.

After learning about the new technology from a theoretical paper published in a Soviet journal, a team of Argonne engineers began a program four years ago to investigate the process. Last July, Harkness finally met with physicists at the I.V. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow to compare Argonne's progress with that of the Russian team. Soviet microwave technology proved so much more advanced than anything available in the United States, says harkness, that Argonne decided to scrap plans for developing the process idependently, opting instead to piggyback the U.S. efforts onto those of the Moscow group. Mikhail S. Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, or openness, made this possible, Harkness says.

In recent months, the Argonne researchers have verified the conceptual design of the Russian process, using a bench-scale model to treat a gas stream that emulates those exiting sulfur-scrubbing systems at U.S. refineries. Placing the inlet to the glass reaction chamber slightly off-center forces the entering gas to swirl at a velocity near the speed of sound. Waveguides direct the energy from a microwave generator into the center of the reaction chamber.

The microwaves electronically excite the gas into a plasma -- in this case, a neutral mix of hydrogen and sulfur ions missing their outer electrons. Centrifugal force then separates the ions. The heavier sulfur, flung to the walls of the chamber, condenses to a liquid and collects beneath the chamber. The lighter hydrogen gas swirls on through the chamber, from which it can be collected as a nearly pure gas.

Last week, Harkness' team firmed up plans for several U.S. industrial partners to participate in two Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) with Argonne and the Kurchatov Institute. "We're looking to have our CRADAs in place by June 1," Doctor says.

The new technology "shows a lot of promise," says Barry Brunsman, a chemical engineer with the Chicago-based Gas Research Institute, one of the project's industrial partners. And the potential market for this process is "substantial," he says. Most oil refineries include a sulfur-removal step, and 25 to 30 percent of all natural gas in the United States requires hydrogen sulfide removal, Brunsman notes.

Over the past two years, Russian scientists have proved "quite open -- even anxious -- to share technology outside the country," says Raymond F. Decker of Wavemat, Inc., in Ann Arbor, Mich., another industrial partner. And "although it's quite shocking to many people in the United States . . . , we're finding many technologies where they [the former Soviets] are out ahead of us."