You can make syngas from wood, waste products, etc so having good F-T plants is a good idea.
Rather than flare gas off, GTL is an improvement.
on a
cost per unit of energy basis,
crude oil costs 5 or 10 times as much as NG.
there has to be a hitch somewhere.
perhaps someone here knows.
“The F-T reaction typically happens at high pressure (40 atmospheres) and temperature (500o-840oF) in the presence of an iron catalyst.”
Funny. Sounds almost like the conditions you might expect to occur deep in the Earth’s crust, where we find plenty of petroleum products. We also know methane can be an abiotic product, since we find it on planets where there never was life.
Could abiotic methane just be undergoing a similar reaction naturally, to produce the more complex hydrocarbons?
I seem to remember an article that stated a Texas university, I believe it was Texas A&M, had developed a modified, more economical version of the FT GTL approach. Any further info?
Hell with this, why aren’t we gasifying coal, Sasol-style? The US isn’t a country so much as an enormous coal deposit with some dirt on top.
(Not that we shouldn’t do this too)