Developing cost effective Gas to Liquids technology
Posted by Ben Proudlove on Thu, Jan 21, 2010 @ 10:13 AM
Amazing stat: "According to the World Bank, 5.25 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of associated gas - the equivalent of 27 per cent of US gas consumption - was flared in 2004.". This is from an interesting article on the Engineerlive.com website full article can be seen here
The article goes on to mention the reason for the waste is the lack of cost effective technology for capturing this wasted resource offshore, but potentially a solution for this wasteful problem could be small modular systems for conversion of gas to liquids.
So typically what that would involve is first the conversion of the methane (in the associated gas) to syngas in a steam reforming reaction; and then the conversion of the syngas (a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide) via the Fischer Tropsch reaction to a synthetic fuel that could be shipped and distributed using the normal channels.
The article also mentioned two UK companies that are both developing microchannel reaction systems for this offshore purpose: Oxford Catalysts and CompactGTL.
Some of the challenges associated with this process involve the catalysts to be used - they need to of course work for as long as possible (for example steam reforming catalysts can get a build up of carbon pretty quickly limiting their life) and also they need to maximise their activity - both for the steam reforming reaction and the FT reaction stages. For these type of researchers we supply a range of systems for catalyst characterisation (click to view section)
One of the systems included in that section is the High Pressure TGA system from Rubotherm that allows carbon build up on steam reforming catalysts to be accurately measured at high temperatures (up to 1200degC) and raised pressures (50bar) essential information for any cost effective GTL system....