The chemical conversion of natural gas to liquid fuels could provide an attractive alternative to CNG.
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Siluria converts methane, the primary ingredient in natural gas, into liquid fuels and chemical intermediates.
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"For example, you can make liquid fuels from coal, which is an amazing technological feet, " Newell says.
For instance, several companies have developed carbon conversion technologies that use algae to turn carbon into liquid fuels.
It first started working with Virent to produce hydrogen, but later shelved that effort to develop liquid fuels.
Liquid fuels are remarkable and without them the modern world would not have arisen in the form it has.
Globally welcome, today's racially mixed South Africa still needs liquid fuels and chemicals.
Billions of dollars (both private and public) are being spent to learn how to convert biomass to liquid fuels.
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The process, which converts a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide to liquid fuels, and was discovered by German scientists.
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Chemicals may be a low-margin game, but when you transform coal and other substances into liquid fuels there are huge chemical runoffs.
This is the modern alchemy--and increasingly viable global business--of synthetic liquid fuels.
Coal contains high amounts of acid producing sulphur that degrades and poisons the catalytic reformation beds used to form the syngas back into liquid fuels.
Now BP will try to continue where Verenium left off, trying to turn sugarcane bagasse, agricultural waste, and wood products into liquid fuels for transportation.
Irrespective of the reality of anthropogenic global warming is the far more immediately pressing issue of a imminently failing supply of cheap liquid fuels for transportation.
Liquid fuels are required, and in South Africa's case, 29% of demand is met through coal conversion by an indigenous but increasingly international company called Sasol.
It signed with a consortium of companies to create a conversion facility in the UK, utilizing the Fischer Tropsch (FT) technology to convert gas to liquid fuels.
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Even though there has yet to come a gallon of liquid fuels from the company, it has managed to create a lot of paper wealth for Harry R.
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The rail lobby is another powerful friend of coal-to-liquid fuels.
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.
They extract the lumps that yield 165, 000 barrels of liquid fuels a day, from high-octane airplane petrol to superclean diesel for cars, at Sasol's big Secunda plant, 80 kms southeast of Johannesburg.
They went over a comprehensive energy reform plan, and based on their study, they realized that they would be dependent on liquid fuels, but base load wise, they could be energy independent through nuclear power.
Gasification of coal offers the potential to turn dirty burning hydrocarbons into cleaner burning liquid fuels, such as synthetic natural gas, jet fuel and gasoline, as well as hydrogen for fuel cell use, a developing field.
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The bottom line for demand: Global consumption of oil and liquid fuels should increase by about 1.3 million barrels a day in the third quarter from the first quarter, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
As we write in our magazine profile of the company, Chief David Steiner is investing in a handful of far-out technologies he hopes will be able to turn trash into more valuable commodities like liquid fuels.
In July 2006 General Richard Zilmer, the marine general then in charge of American forces in western Iraq, sent out an urgent request for solar panels, wind turbines and other devices to reduce the need for liquid fuels.
Sasol has been in the synthetic fuels business for over half a century, deriving its initial experience in South Africa when the country was isolated during the apartheid years, and it produced liquid fuels from coal turned to syngas.
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"We are a business that grew out of South Africa's desperate need for liquid fuels and industrial chemicals, " says Pieter Cox, an engineer for 32 years with Sasol and since 1997 the CEO at the sumptuous headquarters in a leafy north Johannesburg suburb.
In Yerevan, Armenia, where I was last May, I noticed buses and lorries resplendent with rusty-looking cylinders of gas as their fuel supply, which is more cheaply obtained than liquid fuels, but I emphasise that it is petroleum gas (mainly propane and butane) that is used there and not biogas.
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Most immediately, what fusion in any of its manifestations does not address is the problem of providing liquid fuels as conventional supplies of oil and gas decline, and it is this which is the greatest and most pressing matter to be dealt with, against a backdrop of mere years not a luxury of decades.
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