Over the past century, the number of sulfuric acid plants operating globally has expanded exponentially. Throughout the 20th century, rapid industrial growth in combination with increasing demand for superphosphate fertilizers led to high demand for the “king of chemicals,” sulfuric acid. Today, sulfuric acid is one of the most utilized commodity chemicals in the world with widespread applications in the phosphate fertilizer, non-ferrous metals, chemicals, and oil refining industries. In the early 1900s, the contact process for sulfuric acid production was improved greatly with the development of vanadium-based sulfuric acid catalysts. Previous sulfuric acid manufacturing using lead chamber units or contact processes utilizing platinum catalysts was expensive, unreliable, and produced lower strength acids.

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