Recent Progress in the Reduction of Zinc by Natural Gas

PROPOSALS to use hydrocarbon or natural gases for the reduction of zinc from oxide materials may be traced back through Patent Office files to the early years of the present century. Natural gas at rates cheap enough to compete with solid fuels has been available at or near one major zinc district for more than a decade. That the seemingly meritorious and economically interesting applications of these proposals have not devel-oped into workable processes for direct production of zinc by natural gas cannot be completely ascribed to the proverbial conservatism of the zinc industry. It is possible to produce spelter commercially in normal times from zinc oxide and carbonaceous reducing agents without having a very precise understanding of the chemistry of the process. The reduc-tion by hydrocarbons is not, however, in this class, and the technical complexity of this reduction metallurgy and chemistry prohibits solution of the inherent difficulties by the "hit and miss" methods that are some-times thought to be practical. In a thermodynamic study of the chemistry of zinc smelting, Maier1 made a preliminary study of the chemistry of the use of methane for reducing zinc oxide by thermodynamic means, pointing out that the following reactions, the limits of which could be theoretically predicted, were important: ZnO + CH4 = Zn(gas) + CO + 2H2 [1] CH4 = C -I- 2H2 [2] ZnO + CO = Zn(gas) + CO2 [3] ZnO + H2 = Zn(gas) + H2O [4] Other possible reactions, not discussed in the reference quoted, are: CO2 + CH4 = 2CO + 2H2 [5] H2O + CH4 = CO + 3H2 [6]