And there will be new chemical technology coming to improve GTL in due course.
FORBES: Egypt fallout -- follow Exxon and T Boone Pickens; go long natural gas and frack-baby-frack
This gas-to-liquids (GTL) process is now more broadly entering the rest of the world.
FORBES: Gas-to-Liquids Plants: No Longer Exclusive to Larger Players
GTL, tar sands, ethanol and other alternatives will become more economic by the day (see chart 2).
Oxford is not the only player in the small GTL realm focused on flare gas and stranded fields.
FORBES: Gas-to-Liquids Plants: No Longer Exclusive to Larger Players
For natural gas, consider opportunities in technologies for gas-to-liquids (GTL), and ways to more efficiently and compactly store gas.
FORBES: Egypt fallout -- follow Exxon and T Boone Pickens; go long natural gas and frack-baby-frack
Cox says globalization of the GTL business will be profitable by 2007.
The first is securing the investment commitment for the initial GTL facilities.
FORBES: Gas-to-Liquids Plants: No Longer Exclusive to Larger Players
Proposals include a building a gas-to-liquids plant on the Gulf Coast like the giant Pearl GTL plant Shell has finally finished in Qatar.
FORBES: Shell Oil Axes Exec For Alaska Drilling Fiasco. Will More Heads Roll?
Fuels boss Patrick Davies, along with Cox a management member of the Sasol board, thinks the two foreign GTL facilities are key growth drivers.
In the short-term, GTL could become a "drop-in" replacement for oil-derived kerosene in aero engines and airports without requiring any modifications to equipment, says Airbus.
But Sasol's next generation will be about gas to liquid (GTL).
Cox believes that all in all--transformation, transportation, refining--he can make liquid fuels more cheaply by turning natural gas into GTL than can producers that start by extracting crude oil.
Longer-term, as the technology matures, we can expect to see more GTL plants pop up, particularly the smaller ones costing in the hundreds of millions rather than tens of billions.
FORBES: Gas-to-Liquids Plants: No Longer Exclusive to Larger Players
He says when the GTL plants come on line and chemicals come back to life in a quickening economy, Sasol will show that it can make profits all over the world.
Following a three-hour GTL test flight to Airbus' HQ in Toulouse in February, Robert Nutall, fuel specialist at Rolls Royce suggested alternative jetfuels were no longer a flight of fancy.
In particular, these companies plan to create GTL opportunities where gas byproduct from oil production is too far from pipelines and thus flared, and from smaller gas fields where scale has been a limiting factor.
FORBES: Gas-to-Liquids Plants: No Longer Exclusive to Larger Players
Their goal is to create small-scale and modular GTL systems both on- and offshore to take advantage of a wide range of gas resources that are by themselves too small for larger multibillion GTL plants.
FORBES: Gas-to-Liquids Plants: No Longer Exclusive to Larger Players
Perhaps the most formidable competitor is Compact GTL. This UK-based company is focused largely on addressing the problem of what to do with associated gas resulting from oil development that would otherwise be flared or reinjected.
FORBES: Gas-to-Liquids Plants: No Longer Exclusive to Larger Players
And earlier this month, Airbus, in association with Shell, Rolls Royce and Qatar Airways, began a research project to test 'Gas to Liquid' (GTL) technologies that convert lower-emission natural gas and other synthetic fuels into liquid kerosene.
If built as planned, Shell's two GTL plants (one scheduled to open in 2008-09 and the second in 2010-11) will have a combined daily capacity of 140, 000 barrels, as compared with Sasol's two 34, 000-barrel-a-day plants in Nigeria and in Qatar.
The GTL analysis reiterates this insight.
FORBES: Distributed Energy Delivers Big, Green Results in London
Considering the opportunities to treat gas that would otherwise be flared, to unlock otherwise uneconomic shale and conventional gas fields, and increasing opportunities for biomass, waste and coal conversion, small-scale GTL may well have a significant niche to fill in our emerging energy picture.
FORBES: Gas-to-Liquids Plants: No Longer Exclusive to Larger Players
应用推荐