Improved Fischer-Tropsch Economics Enabled by Microchannel ...

Billions of Gallons/Year
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
Current Demand
MSW/CDW
Forest
viable sources. See Figure 12. Microchannel FT permits
economic production at this smaller scale.[14]
Another advantage of microchannel FT technology is
that it enables facilities to be placed on offshore structures.
A conceptual sketch of such a plant is shown in Figure 13.
20
10
Agricultural
0
Figure 11. U.S. demand for distillate fuel versus biomass available
for conversion to FT fuels
Offshore Gas to Liquids. Natural gas without access to the
world market is known as “stranded gas.” This includes
large reserves in remote places and associated gas that is coproduced
with oil. The quantity of stranded gas is estimated
to be between 900 and 9,000 trillion cubic feet in
volume,[12,13] which is sufficient to supply current level of
U.S. distillate fuels demand for more than 300 years.
As noted above, natural gas is either co-produced with
petroleum or sits on top of petroleum reservoirs. With no
local market for this gas, oil production is not possible
without venting, flaring or reinjection of this gas back into
the reservoir. Due to concern about safety, resource
conservation and greenhouse gas emissions, venting and
continuous flaring are banned or highly discouraged in
nearly all oil producing regions of the world. This leaves
reinjection, which currently cost up to $13 per equivalent
barrel of petroleum, and these costs are highest offshore. A
better solution is to convert this gas into liquid fuels in a FT
process.
Figure 13. Concept GTL facility on Floating Production Storage
and Offloading (FPSO) vessel
Stage of Development
As of early 2011, microchannel FT technology is entering
the final stages of commercialization. In 2010, a successful
field demonstration of a 25 gal/day rector was conducted at
a biomass gasification plant in Güssing, Austria. The
skidded FT unit for the Austrian demonstration is shown in
Figure 14. A second demonstration, slated for 2011 in
Brazil, will be of an integrated GTL process, which includes
both microchannel FT and microchannel steam methane
reforming (SMR).
Conventional
LNG / GTL
4 >50 (in tcf)
73 5-50
337 1-5
Microchannel
GTL
347
719
1,043
0.5-1
0.25-0.5
0.1-0.25
3,922 gas fields