Empirical Analysis Of The Sulfur Transport Demand

Sulphur is a basic element of industry to be used for sulphuric acid production, which is a raw material of chemical and phosphate fertilizer industries. Chinese industry used to produce sulphuric acid with pyrite, but this method is a low efficient and has a bad influence on environment. It also resulted in a low output of phosphate fertilizer and China has to import fertilizer to meet domestic customer's needs. Since 1998, Chinese fertilizer industry began to improve their sulphuric production capacity with sulphur to meet the market's increasing consumption instead of imported fertilizer. According to the increased capacity of fertilizer, China needs more and more sulphur for sulphuric acid production. China's sulphur supply is entirely relying on importing. Due to the development in recent years, China becomes the first largest sulphur importing country in a world from 2002. Total imported sulphur was reached to 18.5% of worldwide trading volume of sulphur. 90% of imported sulphur of China was used for chemical products and fertilizer production. It is quite important for us to research supply and demand of sulphur market, as sulphur as a basal raw material has an impact on China's foundation of industries. Equally, the research on sulphur transportation is quite necessary for imported sulphur market. It is only five years for us to use sulphur to produce sulphuric acid in China, so that there are few research and survey on sulphur market. Not only in China, but also in worldwide the related research articles on sulphur are quite few. The reason is that the property of sulphur has particularity, which has different supply sources and demand status. On the other hand, transportation market are diversified and various that also lead the market research quite difficult. In first chapter of my article, I specified the sulphur market and gave an introduction of sulphur transportation, meanwhile bring forward the topic of my research. Based on the data of historical sulphur transportation from June of 2000 to February of 2004, I analyzed the transportation status between North America to China and Middle Eastern to China from Mathematics and estimated a model for sulphur transportation. This model discovered a negative correlativity and substitution relationship between volume and freight of sulphur in separate markets from North America and Middle East. It is the first time to define the truth and fact between the volume and freight of sulphur with math method and empirical study on sulphur international transportation.