Fuel efficient: Synfuels has operated a demonstration facility in Texas since 2005. The company says that its gas-to-liquid technology is cost efficient enough to allow natural gas to be converted into gasoline.
Synfuels
A firm claims to have a cheaper way to harness natural gas.
A Texas company says that it has developed a cheaper and cleaner way to convert natural gas into gasoline and other liquid fuels, making it economical to tap natural-gas reserves that in the past have been too small or remote to develop.
The company behind the technology, Dallas-based Synfuels International, says that the process uses fewer steps and is far more efficient than more established techniques based on the Fischer-Tropsch process. This process converts natural gas into syngas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide; a catalyst then causes the carbon and hydrogen to reconnect in new compounds, such as alcohols and fuels. Nazi Germany used the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert coal and coal-bed methane into diesel during World War II.
A Synfuels gas-to-liquids (GTL) refinery goes through several steps to convert natural gas into gasoline but claims to do so with better overall efficiency. First, natural gas is broken down, or "cracked," under high temperatures into acetylene, a simpler hydrocarbon. A separate liquid-phase step involving a proprietary catalyst then converts 98 percent of the acetylene into ethylene, a more complex hydrocarbon. This ethylene can then easily be converted into a number of fuel products, including high-octane gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. And the end product is free of sulfur.
"We're able to produce a barrel of gasoline for much cheaper than Fischer-Tropsch can," says Kenneth Hall, coinventor of the process and former head of Texas A&M University's department of chemical engineering. Hall says that a Fischer-Tropsch plant is lucky to produce a barrel of gasoline for $35 but that a much smaller Synfuels refinery could produce the same barrel for $25. Under current fuel prices, such a plant could pay for itself in as little as four years, the company says.
Texas A&M University licensed its approach to Synfuels and partly owns the company, which has been operating a $50 million demonstration plant in Texas since 2005 and says that it is close to signing a deal for its first commercial refinery near Kuwait City.
Synfuels president Tom Rolfe says that the company has developed some proprietary components and catalysts, but he adds that much of the approach is based on off-the-shelf technologies. He says that Synfuels' main advantage is the efficiency by which it breaks down and reassembles hydrocarbon molecules. "Nobody has achieved as high a conversion rate of natural gas into acetylene as we have," Rolfe says.
Ali Mansoori, a professor of chemical engineering and physics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says that the process seems far less complicated than those found in a Fischer-Tropsch plant. "The numbers reported for conversion efficiency and selectivity look quite promising," he adds.
But Synfuels isn't alone in trying to make GTL more economical. Gas Reaction Technologies, a spinoff from the University of California, Santa Barbara, has developed a process that converts natural gas into bromine-based compounds that are later converted into liquid fuels.
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Aversion to Petro Hydrocarbons
While many will post comments that "WE" need to get off Petro Hydrocarbons, the truth is reality. There is NO viable alterative to Petro Hydrocarbons at this time nor most likely in my lifetime.
The Truth is the entire world and the USA is totally powered by Hydrocarbons. Thus efforts such as the conversion of Natural Gas to Gasoline is very good as it gives us the time to develope altertive energy sources.
Every thinking person has realized by now that the high cost of energy has affected everything we touch, eat, use or wear. High energy prices affect even the poorest of us the most but ALL are affected. We need to lower the cost of energy and the only way to do so in the next 20, 30 or 50 plus years is to produce more not less energy from the only universal source we have Petro Hydrocarbons.
Sorry, I lived long enough to remember riding in a mule wagon. The animal energy mode while "natural and carbon free" is a extremely poor substitute for real plentiful energy. Don't believe it look at "progress" in Africa or any other animal powered society.
Sorry Doc but I take a world with antibotics and MRI's over the altertive.
John Richmond
I'll grant all arguments, including many that I consider unsound, to the point that we need to break the current dependence on fossil fuels. Among those arguments are those that point at the economic impact of reliance on foreign sources -- to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars exported each year to purchase fuels.
But an abrupt break would be catastrophic for our economy and quality of life, not to mention national security.
We have enormous social and economic investments in the infrastructures that support our current lifestyles. Those "big oil" companies so often criticized are publicly owned, providing investment income to pension funds, 401k funds owned by individuals and supplying income to widows and orphans. Millions of people are employed in manufacture and distribution of vehicles and in gasoline production and distribution and the related infrastructures -- and don't forget the many millions more who provide goods and services to the people so employed.
We have many tens of millions of existing vehicles whose value would be lost if fuel were not available to them. Yes, I applaud innovations such as plugin hybrids, perhaps biofuels (although the initial approaches may be counterproductive) and new battery technologies or (as yet still on the distant horizon, fuel cells) that may result in usable electric vehicles. It's clear that it will take one or two decades to transition from currently used vehicles to new generations of vehicles less dependent on petroleum fuels. Some of the technologies that now look attractive may not pan out. Some may turn out too expensive, or require a new infrastructure that doesn't develop. The marketplace will winnow out those.
Reasonably economic gasoline/diesel fuel produced from domestic sources of natural gas would cushion the transition period to new technologies, as well as reduce the export of dollars to foreign fuel sources. It looks promising in that role.
If one is focussed on global warming, I still recommend the potential of vehicular fuels from natural gas as a reasonable and prudent step -- along with many others -- to move forward.
Synfuels International's GTL is the only GTL technology that can be economically located upstream at the source of associated gas flaring. The World Bank estimates that 5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas is flared into the atmosphere annually. Others think it is twice that.
The argument for GTL is not just can we produce more fuel? It is how much fuel can we extract and use from existing sources. The answer is literally tens of millions of additional barrels annually can be converted to clean burning gasoline.(Synfuels Intl. GTL: <1 ppm sulphur)
It is hard to imagine anyone that would advocate continuing to flare or vent gas that can be economically and efficiently converted to fuel.
You said: Synfuels International's GTL is the only GTL technology that can be economically located upstream at the source of associated gas flaring.
There is at least one other company with cost-effective GTL technology: Gas Reaction Technologies, in Santa Barbara, has been developing a very different route. Check out their web page for a lesson on bromine activated methane. Very interesting...
Ground transportation uses of hydrocarbons are only 42% of our total demand for oil. Even if we can greatly impact gasoline consumption, industry will continue to increase its demand for oil. If all ground transportation oil consumption vanished, we'd still import a large share of our oil needs, and those imports would grow over time.
We can't live with the idea that oil consumption just disappears because we want a different world. As we move closer to a renewable energy economy, we need to realize that our continued need for hydrocarbons can be significantly met by gas-to-liquids, which promises to exploit stranded domestic natural gas reserves that would not otherwise be used. Gas-to-liquids can provide far more liquid fuels than ethanol much more cheaply.
Over half the U.S. natural gas reserves are considered to be stranded. Once converted to liquids, such reserves would be much cheaper to transport and would be a more valuable product.
Global warming is an important issue, but it won't be solved overnight or even in the next several decades. Gas-to-liquids is one of the better alternatives to produce significnt quantities of domestic hydrocarbons from an otherwise ineffective source. If the product is gasoline, then other oil can meet existing industrial needs. Nothing changes the fact that we ought to move quickly to more efficient consumption technologies such as hybrid vehicles.
Although I am hopeful I know it is currently unrealistic to jump from oil as the primary automotive fuel to solar, wind and ocean generated electric energy for automobiles. A famous man once said "do not what you desire but what you can do" Please look at the facts on the ground and you will find that natural gas is much cleaner and is a realistic next step. We could conceivably stop importing oil within a few years by utilizing the Natural Gas to Gasoline. Yeah!! Please look up the reserves of natural gas in the United States if you don't understand. We recently went from 123 to 23,000 after the discovery of a field in Texas known as the Barnett shale. It is here in my home town and it is unbelievable how many common folks are benefiting from their leases and best of all it comes from here in the great old USA. You can find out more in the national geographic survey. Time is of the essence. $150 barrels of oil may again be around the corner. Lets not wait until its too late. Someday we wont need hydrocarbon fuels but right now we do and we can do something about it! I once heard that if we didn't import oil we would not have a trade deficit. Look it up.Thanks for the article Tyler Hamilton its good to know that we are making progress in our energy independence :)
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johnsonha143
6 Comments
Wrong way!
We going the wrong way here folks. We need to get off fossil fuels. Finding new ways to make gasoline is not going to get our society any less addicted to fossil fuels. We need to transition our infrastructure from supporting the (largely inefficient) internal combustion engine (ICE) to building and maintaining the (more efficient) electric motor. Fossil fuels, in any form, are going to run out eventually. Electricity is NEVER going to run out. As long as the sun shines, as long as the wind blows, as long as the tides come and go, we will have electrity.
While I tip my hat to the genious of this innovation, it only serves to keep our society addicted to fossil fuels. This must end, and end soon!
HJ
Waldorf, MD
howard.johnson@att.net
Reply
shomas
245 Comments
Re: Wrong way!
Persons that are concerned about carbon cycles and weather they are negative or positive, should be excited about this technology. Methane gas produced from rotting vegetation is carbon neutral. Producing fuels for combustion engines this way would cause your car to have less of a carbon foot print. Making a market for methane gas also has the ancillary effect of encouraging companies to use existing sources of methane instead of letting pass into the atmosphere ware it has an effect as a green house gas.
Reply
MakeSense
99 Comments
Re: Wrong way!
Just to clarify a point. Methane is a 20-times more potent GHG than carbon dioxide. So, when organic material decays to methane, atmospheric CO2 essentially trades up to methane. Natural processes remove methane from the air at an historic rate. When humans amass organic debris into anaerobic landfills, a slight imbalance of methane is produced.
Flaring the methane or using it for energy converts the carbon back to carbon dioxide, making it carbon neutral again. I probably didn't explain that well, but the net result is that atmospheric carbon dioxide eventually becomes carbon dioxide again, rather than the worse compound, methane.
The trend toward flaring or combusting landfill methane has lowered this source of GHGs even while the number of landfills has grown. That's a small amount of good news on the global warming front.
Reply
trebaryar
4 Comments
Re: Wrong way!
And for Aircraft? Big Batteries?
Reply
Siphon
152 Comments
Re: Wrong way!
Actually, that's not as far fetched as you'd think. Vanadium boride flow batteries are being developed with more than sufficient energy density for aircraft.
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/07/researchers-d-2.html
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