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Roundup: Experts Predict Broad Use of Gas-to-Liquids Technology in Energy Industry

Posted on: Thursday, 29 September 2005, 09:00 CDT

Roundup: Experts predict broad use of gas-to-liquids technology in energy industry

JOHANNESBURG, Sept. 28 (Xinhua) -- With diesel demand rising at about 3 percent a year for the past decade in the world, interest in gas-to-liquids (GTL) diesel is now gathering pace and experts attending World Petroleum Congress has forcast a brighter future for the technology.

Pat Davies, chief executive of Sasol, the world's leading producer of GTL, said the high oil price has renewed international focus on his company's Fischer-Tropsch technology.

"Many oil poor, coal rich countries from all over the world are expressing increased interest in GTL," he said.

Tony Pytte, another official with the Johannesburg-based company, commented that GTL diesel has already demonstrated its potential in the global transport market. The availability of fuel from Bintulu in Malaysia has allowed the product to be tested extensively in the international market.

GTL diesel from Bintulu is being used in the Thai, Japanese and Californian markets, and has been introduced to a bus trial in central London, Pytte said, adding that GTL fuels produced in South Africa has been consumed domestically.

Pytte said the technology has not been used on a global scale before simply because oil supplies have been abundant and refining has been less expensive. But the cost of GTL technology today is increasingly competitive with oil refining because refining costs for cleaner fuels are rising and because GTL producers can target the products slate to produce diesel and other middle distillates, for which demand growth is highest. In addition, GTL diesel is already ultraclean, with virtually no sulfur or aromatics. Because of this, there is continuing research and development focus on GTL technology to further lower capital and operating costs.

The European Union is now finalizing legislation that will mandate sulfur-free diesel for on-road use by 2009. The United States, Japan and Australia are all heading the same way.

At the end of the 1990s, clean diesel around the world still contained about 500 PPM sulfur, highlighting the magnitude of clean- fuel advances in recent years.

Significant refinery investment will be required to meet the sulfur-free specifications. GTL diesel could play a significant role in assisting refiners in terms of quantity and quality.

Typically, the diesel yield of GTL plants is around 70 percent, much higher than refineries at around 40 percent.

Pytte said in terms of quality, GTL diesel also fits the future. With virtually no sulfur or aromatics and a very high cetane level, of over 70 percent, GTL diesel exceeds the cleanfuel specifications of tomorrow. It can also be used as a neat fuel or as a fuel blend in existing diesel engines and future advanced diesel, diesel- electric hybrid and some fuel-cell technologies.

He said the properties of GTL diesel make it an ideal blending component to upgrade lower-quality middle-distillate streams to on- road diesel quality. This could be particularly valuable in Europe where refinery configurations make upgrading these streams increasingly difficult and expensive. On a volume basis alone, GTL diesel will allow refiners to increase their diesel output.

However, a frequently raised concern about the GTL process is that it produces more carbon dioxide than oil refining, although the end use of GTL fuels is more efficient.

The origins of GTL technology date back to 1913 when a German company discovered the probability of mixtures of higher hydrocarbons and oxygenated compounds being produced through the catalytic reaction of hydrogen (H2) and carbon monoxide (CO).

This vision was realized when two chemists in Germany, Franz Fischer and his Czech-born partner, Hans Tropsch, developed a unique chemical process to produce synthetic fuels (synfuels) from coal in the 1920s. In 1923, Fischer and Tropsch published the first findings of their results of producing synthesis gas (syngas) from coal using an alkali-iron catalyst. They continued their research and development, experimenting with different catalysts, pressures, temperatures and reactor designs.

The Fischer-Tropsch process was used extensively in Germany between 1932 and 1945 to produce synthetic petroleum and diesel. In this process, coal -- in the presence of steam (H2O) and oxygen -- is gasified to produce syngas, the primary building block that is purified and converted to produce liquid synfuels and other hydrocarbons.

Interest in the Fischer-Tropsch process subsequently spread to several industrial nations, including Britain, France, the United States, Japan and China, during the 1930s and 1940s, when experimental work was conducted at bench and pilot-plant scale.

In the aftermath of the international oil crisis in the 1970s, a resurgence in gas-based conversion technologies further galvanized momentum in the research laboratories of some of the world's leading energy companies, including those of BP, Exxon and Shell.

Now, with ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Sasol and Shell being the first companies to commit themselves to building GTL plants in Qatar, pytte said it is safe to assume the international commercial era of GTL will commence in earnest over the next five or so years as these and other players start to bring GTL production capacity on line and GTL products to an eco-conscious market.

Source: Xinhua News Agency - CEIS

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