The U.S. can build its
domestic
oil supply, end its natural gas CO2.
Our unrealized
GTL Oil Fields
Twice the oil we import from OPEC
Surplus natural gas, when synthesized into
oil, would replace almost twice the oil the United States is importing from the
Mideast.
Natural Gas GTL oil is the gateway
to Biogenic GTL oil.
Fossil GTL
oil from Natural Gas.
Introduction
Part 1
Part 2
Part 4 Making oil in Michigan.
Biogenic (carbon-neutral) GTL oil using nuclear process
heat.
Part 5
Exploring other potential sources of oil.
Coal GTL Oil Coal GTL oil from coal
using nuclear process heat.
http://www.futurecoalfuels.org/
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Introduction. This approach to improving our oil energy security while rolling back Global Warming is not being very well publicized.
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GTL Oil from Natural Gas.
Global Warming's Oil Gusher: Natural Gas GTL Oil.
World wide, natural gas burning is making about half as much Global Warming CO2 as coal burning. Ending natural gas burning is our bonus in the struggle to end Global Warming: We would be able to make almost twice as much oil from natural gas as we are importing from the Mideast.
(2)
Wherever we are burning natural gas to make heat, convert that heating equipment
to either "tiny nuclear" for multi-building complexes or electric for
residential. All we need do is substitute electric heat rods for gas burner
pipes in our residential furnaces. To ending gas heat.
>>>
Ending natural gas burning to end
Global Warming will create a surplus of natural gas, the best possible
feedstock for synthetic oil and gasoline. We
do have a lot of natural gas. At current consumption rates, natural gas
companies in the U.S. are claiming to hold sufficient resources to keep us
independent for 116 years. Known to
the oil world as "GTL," or Gas-to-Liquid, natural gas synthetics
make the cleanest diesel fuels and the best engine oils. This huge amount of
surplus natural gas will enable us to more than replace the oil we are importing
from OPEC.
Shell Pearl Summary pdf
Best Example: Shell says their "Pearl" GTL synthesis facility in Qatar will be producing 140,000 barrels per day of synthetic oil plus 120,000 barrels a day of other petroleum products from 1.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day. (Right) U.S. Natural Gas pipelines.
We have more than enough natural
gas. -
Shell's "Pearl" plant consumes 1.6 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day. 61 Bscf/d is enough to feed 33 Shell "Pearl" GTL synthesis plants to make 4.6 million barrels of oil a day - 22% of our entire oil needs. Almost twice the 2.8 million barrels of oil a day we are importing from the Mideast (Persian Gulf). 2010 industrial cost for a 1,000 scf of natural gas was about $6. That comes out to about $80 per barrel of oil for just the feedstock.
At 18 billion dollars per plant, to build all 33 plants would cost us slightly less than 600 billion dollars. Much less than an oil war. Think of the economic and military independence, the more than 100,000 high-paying refinery type jobs, the ability to sidestep the "Peak Oil" crisis, and the money we would keep in America and keep from those who hate us. Not to mention ending United States' 1.3 billion metric tonnes share of the world's annual 5.3 billion metric tonnes of natural gas Global Warming CO2.
(Right) Ending 75% of all natural gas burning as part of a comprehensive program to roll back Global Warming.
Good progress is being made to
reduce consumption of all forms of oil.
Hybrids, Plug-ins and All-electric
vehicles are on the docket for all countries.
Unlike coal, which is strip-mined to obtain virtually limitless quantities quickly, which, in turn, produces virtually limitless amounts of Global Warming CO2, pumpable fossil oil's severe pumping and refining limitations along with its synthesis limitations using natural gas as a feedstock, creates a production and consumption bottleneck that will help keep the volume of oil's CO2 within the ability of land plants to sink it into the ground by forest burial.
(Right) It's relatively easy to keep
scaling up coal burning. This is not a fake photograph. The bed is removed.
IPCC's take:
CO2 Decay If Emissions are Reduced .pdf
See also: http://www.greenspirit.com/trees_answer.cfm
http://www.synfuels.com/
The future holds another environmental benefit for synthetic oil: PBMR, a South African reactor company, recently announced they are coming out with a reactor designed to power South Africa's Sasol coal-to-liquid (CTL) synthesis plants to minimize CO2 emissions. If PBMR's reactor can reduce CO2 from Sasol's CTL, it should make the much cleaner Shell GTL process even cleaner still.
A PBMR reactor-driven version of Sasol's process could also make hyper-clean, CO2-neutral, synthetic oils from biogenic sources such as wood pellets, sewage, algae, etc. If sufficient biogenic materials could be obtained (10 million tons per day for just the U.S. alone) this would INTENSELY REVERSE Global Warming if coal and natural gas boilers were also repowered with small ship-sized nuclear boilers.
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We have the
best
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How we can phase out heating with natural gas so we can turn almost all of it into oil:
Replace natural gas with nuclear heat in large building complexes, replace natural gas with nuclear electricity heat in your house.
Any place that has large SMOKESTACKS is
typically burning natural gas for heat:
College and University Campuses . . .
Shopping Malls . . . Hospital Campus . . . Apartment Complexes . . . Commercial
Office, Industrial, and Manufacturing Building Complexes . . . State Capital
Building Campuses . . . Military Bases . . . Prison Complexes . . . Casino
Complexes . . . District Heating . . . Federal Building Campuses . . . Large
Food Processing Facilities . . . Biofuel Processing Heat . . . Small Rural
Electricity Generation Plants . . . Large Airport Terminals . . .
(left) How natural gas is being used in the United States.
Every smokestack in every town in the world is a fossil fuel candidate for conversion from coal, natural gas, or oil to Hyperion, NuScale, mPower, and Toshiba 4S "Nuclear Repowering."
MicroNuclear reactors to eliminate the smokestack's CO2 emissions. Most cities have multi-building college, hospital, office, or factory complexes that are burning coal or natural gas to power both their heating and air conditioning systems. A typical example is the U.S. Congress' 7-building U.S. Capitol complex in Washington, D.C. Capitol Power Plant
Look for smokestacks near you.
Residential heating and cooling will be by electricity generated using nuclear heat.
What about the stuff from natural gas we can't do without?
5% of our oil goes into plastics, 10% of our oil and natural gas is consumed in producing and transporting our food. Our food is associated with more greenhouse gases than our automobiles.
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Natural Gas
Information, general:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/natural_gas/info_glance/natural_gas.html
Natural Gas Maps:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/natural_gas/analysis_publications/maps/maps.htm
United States' estimated natural gas
reserves exceed 238 trillion cubic feet. (BP Data)
Data in xls file
China's verified natural gas reserves exceed 66 trillion cubic feet. Figures
for China's natural gas reserves vary wildly. (BP Data)
Again, the United States burns about 850 million gallons of oil every day, importing about 504 million gallons of oil every day.
http://www.shell.com/home/content/aboutshell/our_strategy/major_projects_2/pearl/process/acc_gtl_processes.html
Shell Pearl plant: 320kboe/d
of gas resulting in: 140kbbl/d of diesel GTL products (2 trains), 120kboe/d of
NGLs, ethane and enough water to supply the process, workers, and a little
landscaping.
Notice that if we synthesized diesel out of our natural gas (using nuclear heat to power the process to save oil) it would nearly replace the ALL the oil we are importing?
We haven't built a new oil refinery since the mid-70s.
Time we built our first 140,000 barrel-a-day synthetic oil refinery.
Mobility is what separates animals
from plants. We benefit greatly from our oil-powered vehicles that give us
highly mobile lives. We won't give that up.
Heck, Germany powered their side of World War II making gasoline and diesel from
lignite, which is a very low grade of coal.
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propane - The "gas" fuel from oil.
How we can combine fighting Global Warming while building Oil
Energy Independence
The idea is simple and direct: Stop
burning our natural gas and synthesize it into oil instead.
Synthetic Oil from Natural Gas .pdf
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Making synthetic oil from natural gas
GUY CHAZAN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL FEBRUARY 8, 2009
Write to Guy Chazan at guy.chazan@wsj.com
(FACTOID: ExxonMobil’s massive refinery in Baytown, Texas, with a capacity of 562,000 barrels per day, is the nation’s largest.)
In the search for alternatives to gasoline, Royal Dutch Shell PLC has made one of the biggest and boldest bets in the energy industry.
The Anglo-Dutch company is investing up to $18 billion in a vast plant in Qatar to transform natural gas into clean-burning synthetic diesel fuel. Due to come on line in late 2010, it is one of the world’s most ambitious industrial projects and Shell’s largest single investment.
But the development, known as Pearl GTL, involves huge risks. It’s based on a technology known as gas to liquids, or GTL, that is untested on such a massive scale. And with construction costs higher than they were when the project was announced in 2002, some Shell investors fear that Pearl could suffer the same extended delays and budget blowouts that have plagued other multibillion-dollar energy projects around the world in recent years.
There are also concerns that the project might not be viable with oil prices around current levels. The International Energy Agency says the cost per barrel of producing GTL is in the range of $40 to $90. GTL looked like a safe bet when crude traded at a record high around $150 a barrel in July, but with prices now hovering around $40, GTL’s economics are no longer so sturdy.
The IEA also warns that, while GTL fuel burns cleaner than gasoline, the production process emits so much carbon dioxide that costs could increase significantly if governments impose taxes on greenhouse-gas emissions to help fight global warming.
The agency calls GTL’s long-term future “uncertain” and says it expects the production of GTL fuel to total 650,000 barrels per day by 2030 — just 0.6% of the projected global oil output for that year.
GTL’s murky prospects reflect a wider problem across the energy industry. Western oil majors, largely frozen out of the places where oil is plentiful and easily accessible, like the Middle East, Russia and Venezuela, are increasingly turning to so-called unconventionals — difficult-to-extract resources such as shale gas in the U.S. and oil from Canadian tar sands, and technologies like GTL and liquefied natural gas. But the investments required are so huge they only make sense if the price of oil stays high.
Some in the industry wonder whether unconventionals can break even with oil below $60 a barrel. And some plans are being rethought. Shell, for instance, has delayed a decision on expanding its Canadian oil-sands venture, in the hope that the overheated market for the labor, materials and services it uses will cool and costs will come down. But on Pearl, Shell has ruled out any delays.
Shell
The Shell Pearl GTL plant is under construction at Ras Laffan, the industrial city 50 miles north-east of Doha, Qatar, where Shell Pearl has its operations
Shell started experimenting with GTL technology during the energy crisis of the 1970s, when it began to search for an alternative to gasoline. In 1993, Shell opened its first GTL demonstration plant in Bintulu, Malaysia. The project was derailed in 1997 by a massive explosion caused by a profusion of carbon molecules in the air as a result of extensive forest fires in Indonesia. It took three years to repair the damage.
Since then, fuel from the Bintulu plant has built up a small but growing presence on the market. Shell’s V-power diesel, which is blended with GTL fuel, has proved a hit with drivers in Europe despite selling at a premium to conventional diesel. GTL fuel ignites more easily than conventional fuels, so it improves the performance of car engines. An Audi race car powered by diesel blended with Shell GTL has won the Le Mans 24-hour endurance race in France for the past three years.
In 2002, Shell announced its Pearl GTL venture, in partnership with state-run Qatar Petroleum. For both partners, the project offers diversification. Gas-rich Qatar can turn some of that resource into higher-value fuel and lubricants, reducing its exposure to shifts in natural-gas prices on the international market. For Shell, Pearl is the key to its efforts to reduce its dependence on petroleum-based products as concerns grow about the depletion of the world’s oil supply.
Some 35,000 workers are employed at what is one of the world’s largest construction sites. When finished, the complex will boast four cricket pitches for its workers, three soccer fields, an outdoor movie theater — and its own mayor.
Building such a huge complex is costly, but there’s no question it can be done. Making GTL technology work on such a grand scale is less of a certainty. “If Shell can pull off Pearl it will be an earth-shaking technological achievement,” says Dan Rogers, a Houston-based lawyer with the law firm King & Spalding who specializes in energy infrastructure projects.
Analysts say the success or failure or the Pearl plant will go a long way toward determining other energy companies’ interest in GTL fuel. So far, there are only three small GTL plants operating commercially — the Mossel Bay plant operated by Petroleum Oil & Gas Corp. of South Africa in its home country; the Oryx plant in Qatar, a joint venture of South Africa’s Sasol Ltd. and Qatar Petroleum; and Shell’s Bintulu plant.
Other companies have looked at GTL but gradually backed away because of technological and cost concerns. ConocoPhillips, Marathon Oil Corp. and Exxon Mobil Corp. have all jettisoned planned GTL projects in Qatar. Algeria last year canceled tenders for a GTL project in Tinrhert. Chevron Corp. and Nigerian National Petroleum Corp. are moving ahead with their Escravos plant in Nigeria, but costs have increased substantially and the start-up date has been pushed out a year, to 2011.
Some industry observers think GTL’s future lies less in megaprojects like Pearl than in much smaller-scale applications. For instance, a British company, CompactGTL PLC, is developing a system to make synthetic crude oil from the gas produced as a byproduct of oil extraction. Currently, much of that gas is simply burned off, or “flared.”
“There’s more than five trillion cubic feet a year of gas that’s flared — more than the consumption of France and Germany combined,” says Peter Riches, CompactGTL’s CEO. “That’s a huge market for us.”
—Mr. Chazan is a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal in London.
Write to Guy Chazan at guy.chazan@wsj.com
FACTOID: ExxonMobil’s massive refinery in Baytown, Texas. With a capacity of 562,000 barrels per day, is the nation’s largest.
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A firm claims to have a cheaper way to harness natural gas.
By Tyler Hamilton Friday, August 15, 2008
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.
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.
Credit: Synfuel
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.
Gas to go: Several steps are needed to turn natural gas into gasoline.
Natural gas is broken down under high temperatures into acetylene and a
liquid-phase step converts the acetylene into ethylene. This can be converted
into a number of fuel products, including high-octane gasoline, diesel, and jet
fuel.
Credit: Synfuels
The goal for both companies is the same: to tap into natural-gas reserves that are too small or too remote to economically access with a dedicated pipeline. Much of this gas is a by-product of oil extraction. The World Bank estimates that more than 150 billion cubic meters of natural gas--equivalent to the combined gas consumption of France and Germany--are flared or released into the air every year by oil companies that have no economical way of getting the gas to market. The resulting greenhouse-gas emissions are a major contributor to climate change, the World Bank adds.
"With our technology, you can go into the field and process that natural gas into gasoline," Rolfe says. "Now it's a liquid, so it can be sent in existing oil pipelines. There's a huge opportunity for this in places like Russia, the Middle East, and South America."
There is also opportunity in Alaska's North Slope, where oil giants such as BP have been considering GTL projects as a way of getting natural gas to market as a by-product of oil extraction. BP spent $86 million on a demonstration Fischer-Tropsch plant in the late 1990s, with the idea that natural gas could be converted into diesel and mixed with crude oil being shipped through the 1,200-kilometer trans-Alaska oil pipeline. But the BP project never proved commercially viable.
Shirish Patil, a professor of petroleum engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, says that the high cost of Fischer-Tropsch and rising oil prices now have the industry tilting toward building a dedicated natural-gas pipeline. But lower GTL costs could change that. "If there's any process that removes some of the steps of Fischer-Tropsch and reduces overall cost of conversion, that will certainly bear out in the economics," Patil says. "And it's the economics that will prevail."
Rolfe says that Alaska is certainly on Synfuels' radar. "We're working with the state of Alaska to use our plants as an alternative," he says. "The Fischer-Tropsch solution for the North Slope is not elegant at all. It's like getting an elephant up there to do your hard work, when all you need is two or three thoroughbred horses." Rolfe adds that a Synfuels refinery can be self-sufficient in remote areas because half the natural gas it taps can go toward power and heating requirements of the plant while the rest is converted into fuels. And unlike a Fischer-Tropsch plant, no hard waxes or toxic by-products result from the Synfuels process.
Synfuels estimates that only 200 of the 15,000 gas fields outside North America are big enough to justify the high capital costs of a Fischer-Tropsch plant. A handful of such plants exist today, including a Shell refinery in Malaysia and the Mossgas plant in South Africa. Another two plants are also under development, in Qatar and in Nigeria.
Devinder Mahajan, a chemical engineer with the Brookhaven National Laboratory, in New York, says that the industry will be somewhat skeptical until Synfuels has a commercial plant in operation. "There are a lot of investors out there who would put the money in if it has the claimed advantages over Fischer-Tropsch."
But such interest is building. In January, Kuwait-based AREF Energy Holding invested $28.5 million in Synfuels for a minority stake in the company and exclusive rights to market the refineries in the Middle East and North Africa. Rolfe says that sales interest is also building in Australia, Argentina, Egypt, and Kazakhstan.
Hall hopes that the last quarter of 2008 will be a "breakout" year for Synfuels and how it is perceived by the major oil companies. He understands, however, the industry's reluctance. "In this industry, everybody wants to be first to be second when adopting new technology. The Fischer-Tropsch process is at least proven. They know it works." By contrast, he says, Synfuels' approach, "hasn't been proven because there aren't any big facilities out there."
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Part 4:
Making oil from natural gas in Michigan.
(Left), producing gas wells,
(Right), producing oil wells.
Michigan has oil that needs the heat of nuclear to clean it up.
The neat thing is we can tap into natural gas from all over the country via the national natural gas line grid.
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Shenhua Completes World’s Largest Coal-to-Olefins Project
4 June 2010
People’s Daily. The Shenhua Baotou Coal-to-Olefins Project was completed in Baotou, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region on 31 May. The project—targeted to produce 1.80 Mt/a methanol [methanol can be easily converted into gasoline] and 600,000 t/a of polyethylene and polypropylene [feedstock for consumer plastics] - is to be operational this year and is the world’s largest coal-to-olefins project.
Coal is gasified into syngas, which is converted to methanol. The methanol is transformed into olefin and the olefin is then polymerized into polyethylene and polypropylene.
This is China’s pilot industrialized coal-to-olefins project. This is also the first time that methanol-to-olefins technology with independent intellectual property rights owned by China’s was used as the core device, which opened a new technical approach for implementing alternative-energy strategies and creating a new coal-to-olefins industry.
This project was approved by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) in December 2006 and began design and construction in 2007. More than 20,000 designers from 70 units and organizations participated in the construction.
