Posted on 05/16/2005 8:06:08 AM PDT by alloysteel
RAS LAFFAN INDUSTRIAL CITY, Qatar:
The rat's nest of pipes and columns snaking across the desert harbors a secret process that will use cobalt to turn natural gas into a powerful, clean-burning diesel fuel.
By next year, rulers of this tiny desert sheikdom hope, these gas-to-liquids (GTL) reactors under construction will bring in billions of dollars while clearing big city smog belched by trucks and buses.
Petroleum experts who have sniffed vials of gin-clear GTL diesel speak of it with reverence.
"It's a beautiful product," says Jim Jensen, a Massachusetts-based energy economist. "The kerosene smells like perfume."
In all, some US$20 billion (euro15 billion) has been committed to build an unprecedented array of clean diesel plants in this Gulf shore industrial park.
Those chipping in include oil titans Royal Dutch/Shell Group, ChevronTexaco Corp. and Exxon Mobil Corp., which is making a US$7 billion (euro5.4 billion) bet on GTL, the largest investment in the corporate history of America's largest company.
Smaller plants in Malaysia, South Africa and the United States have proved the technology works, but none is nearly as large as those planned here. In a few years, says Andy Brown, who heads Shell's office in Qatar, the country will be "the GTL capital of the world."
"This really is where GTL will come of age, where the industry will be born," he said.
By 2011, the Qatar plants should be producing 300,000 barrels of liquid fuels and other products daily. The largest GTL plant now producing is Shell's plant in Bintulu, Malaysia, churning out 14,700 barrels per day.
The investments amount to a big gamble on a clean alternative to pollutant-rich crude oil, based on an obscure "synthetic fuel" process developed to make fuel from coal in 1920s Germany.
Like Qatar's headlong rush to produce liquefied natural gas, the ruling sheiks here are pushing GTL as an idea whose time has come.
The clean-burning fuel, with almost none of the smelly sulfur soot belched by engines firing on conventional diesel, appears tailor-made for countries looking to reduce emissions in line with the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
Faisal al-Suwaidi, chief executive of Qatar Liquefied Gas Co., said he's gotten interest from Japan, Canada, Korea, Europe and the United States, the world's largest polluter. Although Washington has refused to sign the Kyoto protocols, state and local caps on emissions are pushing refiners to clean up diesel.
Complying with Kyoto's strictures "is agenda item No. 1 when we visit countries like Japan," al-Suwaidi said over coffee in his office in the Qatari capital, Doha. "This is the product for them. This is green diesel."
As far as carbon emissions go, green diesel appears to offer only a modest dent, partly because natural gas contains less carbon than oil-based diesel to begin with. The big difference is in sulfur.
Sulfur emissions from diesel engines cause as many as 10,000 deaths a year among Americans with heart and lung ailments, said William Becker, who represents state and local air pollution control agencies in the United States.
"It's a matter of life and death," Becker said. "And the solution depends on removing the sulfur."
Emissions can be cut further by adding better filters that remove up to 90 percent of remaining particulates, said Richard Kassel, a fuels expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York. Sulfur-laden diesel gums up these finer filters, he said.
"Clean fuels open the door to the most advanced emission controls," Kassel said.
Tests of GTL fuel are under way in several countries. Shell is already selling the fuel in Thailand, The Netherlands, Greece and Germany, charging slightly more than its oil-based diesel. In Europe, Shell calls the fuel V-Power Diesel.
Environmentalists like Kassel caution that GTL fuel is most attractive when high oil prices make it competitive. The fuel will probably see most of its smog-cutting in developing countries where emissions standards will require better filters.
"It's going to be a very important blending stock but the idea that it's going to compete with crude oil is overstating the case," Jensen said. "It sort of cuts down on the use of crude but it's not going to massively change things."
GTL diesel from Sasol Chevron, the South African-American joint venture that is a 49 percent shareholder in the first Qatari GTL plant, will surge onto the market next year and could wind up as a niche fuel that powers fleets of city buses and trucks, company spokesman Malcolm Wells said.
More likely, says economist Jensen, the clean fuel will be blended with crude-oil diesel to lower sulfur emissions into compliance with tightening standards in several countries.
The economics of GTL make sense, experts say, when it's produced on a large scale and with a cheap source of natural gas. And Qatar, a Connecticut-sized thumb on the Arabian peninsula, is perhaps the world's best source of cheap gas. It sits on a bubble containing 10 percent of the world's known gas reserves, conveniently gathered in the planet's largest reservoir.
By 2011, Qatar hopes three ventures will convert natural gas into more than 300,000 barrels per day of liquids, most of that diesel fuel, but also including naphtha, liquid petroleum gas and lubricating oil. That much synthetic diesel won't cut into the current market for oil-based diesel -- 13 million barrels a day -- but it might help clear some skylines.
The fuel will be sell for more than conventional diesel, and is hugely profitable with current oil prices above US$50 (euro39) a barrel. But Shell will still profit if oil drops to US$20 (euro15), Brown said.
Exxon Mobil aims to produce 155,000 barrels per day by 2011, said Wayne Harms, Exxon's chief in Qatar.
"We have a lot of money invested here. We're going to invest a lot more," he said. Exxon counts investments in some 200 countries, and Qatar "will be one of our top countries by the end of the decade," he said.
So why aren't we building GTL refineries here? I know, I know. The enviroMENTAL whackos. Again.
Every engineer and mechanic in the world would love to have sulfur-free oils and fuel, if this a viable and economic way of producing it, so be it; but to hang its need or presumed benefits from the necks of the aged and infirm is pious romance.
Whether there are ANY deaths directly attributable to inhalation of Diesel exhaust is a point that has never been proven. But the enviro-whackos, in their apparent great willingness to invent facts to bolster their arguments, have made a couple of points, based largely on the premise that if something stinks (as sulfur-laden exhausts do) it must be bad for you. Take away the stink, and the talking point is much harder to make.
Diesels (compression-ignition internal combustion engines) are vastly more efficient than spark-ignition internal combustion engines, for a couple of reasons. Diesels would run perfectly well on methane fuel alone (as would the spark-ignition), but they may run at a considerably higher compression ratio, which improves the thermodynamics, and with adiabatic expansion of the burned gases, the heat loss through the cooling system is much reduced. Turbocharging the Diesel, using the exhaust stream to compress incoming air through the induction system, raises the efficiency of the Diesel even further. When combined with an efficient transmission gearing system that keeps the engine speed within a very narrow range, it is possible to tune the Diesel for peak efficiency, yielding what appears to be almost fantastic mileage by today's standards.
Build the GTL refineries on floating platforms out at sea, where the methane is being recovered, either from deep-water natural gas wells, or from Methane Hydrate mined from the ocean floor, where it exists as an amorphous solid at depths of 1,000 to 3,000 feet, and the water temperature never rises above about 38 degrees Fahrenheit.
It is estimated that there is perhaps a thousand times more energy captured in these accumulations of Methane Hydrate on the ocean bottom, than all the other known and estimated reserves of all other fossil fuels combined. And it is constantly renewing, as more anaerobic decomposition of organic materials goes on all the time.
Where did you think whale feces went?
Well not to bust any enviroweenies bubble, but evidence is that stardard crude is also a slowly self renewing resource as well...not made up of decayed dinosaurs.... But hey, don't tell the greenies that... it'll blow their minds.
Brilliant! We turn a threat, methane hydrate, into clean burning fuel. We could then fertilize the oceans to encourage plankton growth which recycles carbon dioxide into the deep ocean. Oh yeah, there would be more fish to supply protein to the world's poor people. BTW, the primary fertilizer needed is iron which some oceans are deficient in.
Are you certain that a diesel can run safely on light weight hydrocarbons? I would think that pre-ignition (knock) would be a terrible problem. And I seem to remember that using gasoline in a diesel engine can be very destructive, due to both knock and lack of lubricity because of the absence of higher weight (more like oil) hydrocarbons.
A pure-hybrid diesel electric car - a locomotive with tires, but smaller - would not need a transmission, and would operate at a much higher efficiency than a similar gasoline version. The diesel driven generator would operate only at its most efficient speed, and the electric motor(s) naturally produce an appropriate torque over a wide speed range.
I believe that the transportation fuel of the future is not very different from the transportation fuel of today - it will just come from different sources. After all, would you rather be rear-ended in a car with a 20-gallon tank of hydrogen gas compressed to 20,000 PSI, or a 20-gallon tank of gasoline, when BOTH contain the same amount of hydrogen? I consider this to be a very hopeful development, particularly if the process can use coal (carbon) as a primary input for hydrogenation.
The eventual solution would be to run most of our transportation on the electric grid, most of the time, using some kind of metered trolley or slot car type pickup in central cities and on major intercity routes. The hybrid I mentioned above, equipped with such a pickup device, could be the model private car - on the generator out of your garage and to the expressway, on the grid to (and within) downtown on the streets, and back to generator in the parking garage. Then the reverse going back home.
If we could do that, the Saudi's had better figure out how to run their economy on sand and salt water....
At one time, it was thought necessary to add tetraethyl lead to refined gasoline, to reduce the tendency of gasoline-powered vehicles to "knock" under load. When it was made legally impossible to buy leaded gasoline, the manufacturers of motor vehicles and refineries made the necessary compromises to develop fuels and vehicles that did not need tetraethyl lead.
The upper-end lubrication needs of Diesel engines can be similarly be engineered into the design. As will the capability to reduce preignition.
The rest of your points were very good.
"And it is constantly renewing
Well not to bust any enviroweenies bubble, but evidence is that stardard crude is also a slowly self renewing resource as well...not made up of decayed dinosaurs.... But hey, don't tell the greenies that... it'll blow their minds."
Bingo, to think insitu microbes can feast on ever producing methane gas and produce petroleum as a by product is heresy in the green world of enviro nuts.
George Bush, or Jeb Bush, for that matter, are held hostage to some very powerful forces that seriously believe in NIMBY, and have the muster to put either of them out of office. Not because the NIMBYs are right, but because they have the ear (and the hearts) of the media.
And again, carbon dioxide is NOT a greenhouse gas, in fact it's GOOD for plant life, which dies without it.
"...the United States, the world's largest polluter...
Obviously this writer has never been to Hong kong, China, India. the USA does not pollute near as much as they do.
And hot air, too! It'll power your car right off the nearest bridge. . .
Good explanation, good discussion. I was aware of most of what you had to say here, but we never know who might be looking on, so no problem. The way I see it, either biodiesel or bioethanol yields amount to about 8 barrels per acre, more or less, on irrigated land. perhaps twice that with intensive farming, half or less on dry land.
Processing gain from petroleum amount to around 5%, not 300%, so I am surprised at that number. Do you have a source you can point to for that?
As I said, the diesel pure-hybrid (no direct drive) is where I would place my bet. The motor-generator would run only at its most efficient speed, and the transmission would be eliminated due to the torque characteristics of the electric drive motor(s).
And I certainly think that when we run out of gasoline OR diesel fuel we will just make more, because there is no safer, more efficient way to store hydrogen than as gasoline - or perhaps pure iso-octane, if we are going to manufacture it. If we have a diesel engine motor-generator set in our car that will burn it, instead of a sparker, all the better efficiency.
It equals or betters the performance of a catalytic reformer and fuel cell combination, at far lower cost. And since this is EXACTLY the design of a common diesel locomotive, I think that questions of "scaling up" the design are laughable. But as I said, the power will have to come from nuclear eventually. Big, combined-cycle nuclear plants that will also desalinize and power cities, as well as produce our transportation fuel.
What other new technology? Why are those diesel locomotives still running on plain tracks, instead of electrified routes? And can we ever invent a power pickup device that we can use for our cars and trucks? It needs metering, of course. and infrastructure, on highways and in cities, where it would be more valuable for reducing air pollution than for fuel cost savings. But getting on the grid, and off the Arabian teat - would be the best of all possible worlds.
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