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The spelling in common U.S. useage today is sulfur. Most sulfur (86% as of 1992, the last data I have) is used for making sulfuric acid, by far the broadest-use industrial chemical in the world because it's cheap and an extremely powerful acid. Sulfuric acid use is regarded as one of the most accurate indexes of a nation's industrial development. Principal uses of sulfuric acid are (not in order): 1. steel making, to pickle (clean scale and oxidation) off steel in preparation for rolling, galvanizing, heat-treating, and tinning 2. oil refining, as an organic reagent to reform hydrocarbons and to dissolve impurities 3. fertilizer making, to treat phosphate rock to form phosphoric acid, superphosphate, and triple superphosphate (this is the largest use by volume) 4. ore processing, to leach metallic elements from the worthless country rock (principally copper) 5. All manner of chemical processes. 6. Paper-making (sulfide and sulfate papers, such as Kraft paper) 7. And of course, lead-acid batteries. Sulfur sources include native deposits, principally cap-deposits on salt domes along the Gulf Coast and in co-location with gypsum evaporate basins in Texas, Iraq, Poland, and Russia; sulfide ores of copper, lead, zinc, and silver; sour natural gas, and petroleum sands. Sour natural gas is becoming the biggest North American source, from processing plants in the Western U.S. and Canada. Charlie, if you smell sulfur in natural gas (it's in the form of hydrogen sulfide, a deadly poison gas) it's because it was inadequately purified, not because it was added. Sulfur in natural gas corrodes pipes terribly, as well as being poisonous, so it's removed. In the past, sour natural gas was avoided by the oil companies, but with the prices and supplies the way they are now, they have bitten the bullet and built processing plants. By the way, the quantity of hydrogen sulfide in natural gas sold for use in your furnace or stove is very, very small -- it's very easy to detect by smell, however. Out of the ground, a lot of sour natural gas contains enough hydrogen sulfide to kill you very dead almost instantly. Almost all sulfur shipped for domestic consumption is shipped as a liquid, whereas for export it goes as a solid, loaded in open-top hoppers or coal gondolas. It's shipped as a liquid because it's easy to pump it into and out of tankcars, and because it's easier to work with to make it into acid that way. In the past, the principal domestic supply of sulfur was from domes along the Gulf Coast mined using the Fraasch process (pumping down steam to melt it, and pumping up the molten sulfur), but today those domes are mostly mined out.
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