Sasol, the world's largest producer of motor fuel from coal, says it wants to keep exploring.
Italy has coal in Sardinia, but it lacks the technological base to do the Sasol trick.
Sasol also turns out polypropylene, ammonias, PVC--over 200 fuel and chemical products in all.
Sasol also sponsored the event and provided the learners with caps which were elatedly accepted.
By contrast, Sasol plans to leave the highway infrastructure and engine conversion to those other parties.
FORBES: Sasol's Answer to the Natural Gas Highway: Convert the Fuel
One recent chemicals initiative is Sasol Alpha Olefins, which makes octene, used in detergents, and hexene, used in cellophane.
It also likes the price: Sasol trades for 11.2 times three-year average EPS and 1.87 times book value.
But venturing out of South Africa is still an unproven tack for Sasol.
Sasol's output of synfuels and chemicals is 2% of GDP directly, 4% indirectly.
Davies estimates that between the two pending projects, Sasol's synfuels output will grow to 235, 000 a day, 40% above Secunda alone.
Other competitors in the basic materials sector include: TPC Group, Inc. (TPCG), Braskem (BAK), and Sasol Limited (ADR) (SSL).
Sasol Ltd. shares are currently trading down about 2% on the day.
Crime levels don't quite bear out Sasol boss Pieter Cox's home-front optimism.
To the wider world, however, Sasol is the original innovator in synfuels.
South Africans regard Sasol--originally the South African Coal, Oil and Gas Corporation--in the same way Brits do BP, Norwegians Statoil and Italians AGIP.
Fuels boss Patrick Davies, along with Cox a management member of the Sasol board, thinks the two foreign GTL facilities are key growth drivers.
But Sasol's next generation will be about gas to liquid (GTL).
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.
ASA, carried out initial studies that Sasol says weren't encouraging.
His thrust began with chemicals, still 64% of Sasol's revenue.
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.
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.
Using technology invented in Nazi Germany and perfected by South Africa's Sasol when those countries were under oil embargoes, companies are now also investing furiously to convert not only natural gas but also coal into a liquid fuel.
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.
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.
FORBES: Sasol's Answer to the Natural Gas Highway: Convert the Fuel
"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.
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