Shale Glut Becomes $2 Diesel Using Gas-to-Liquids Plants
 

Their goal is to make motor fuels more cheaply and easily than oil-based products produced at giant refineries, and all within two years.

Andrew Herndon And Brian Swint - BLOOMBERG - October 26, 2012

Drivers are next in line to benefit from the U.S. shale boom.

Technologies that create motor fuels from raw materials other than oil, some drawing on techniques first commercialized in Nazi Germany, are poised to turn the glut of U.S. natural gas into energy for cars, trucks and planes.

A Chesapeake Energy Corp.-backed company and Oxford Catalysts Group Plc are planning U.S. factories to make diesel, gasoline and jet fuel from gas, which fell to a decade-low price this year. Their goal is to make motor fuels more cheaply and easily than oil-based products produced at giant refineries, and all within two years.

U.S. gasoline prices have jumped more than 125 percent since the end of 2008 as crude doubled to more than $100 a barrel. At the same time hydraulic fracturing processes, or fracking, helped gas producers unlock once inaccessible reserves in shale rock. That’s boosted output and driven down prices, sparking interest in using the surplus energy to fill fuel tanks. ... [Read More]

Re: Shale Glut Becomes $2 Diesel Using Gas-to-Liquids Plants
 

Don't get too excited, it will not be produced in enough quantity in the foreseeable future to have any impact on price at the pumps.

Re: Shale Glut Becomes $2 Diesel Using Gas-to-Liquids Plants
 

.... and the energy lost in the conversion process is what? 40% ? .... more?


Much better to promote CNG vehicles and develop CNG fueling infrastructure, imo.

Re: Shale Glut Becomes $2 Diesel Using Gas-to-Liquids Plants
 

"Oxford Catalysts can produce a barrel of premium diesel for $66, or $1.57 a gallon, using gas at $4 per thousand standard cubic feet ($3.89 per mmBtu) at plants with a capacity of just 1,500 barrels a day. "

Assuming* most of the costs are the feedstock that works out to 17 mmBtu of gas to synthesize a barrel of diesel.. a barrel of diesel contains about 5.8 mmBtu of energy, so a conversion efficiency of 34%..

Lots of assumptions here, also these are small plants intended to utilize stranded gas.. presumably the Shell and SASOL plants that make 100k+ barrels a day are more efficient.

Its barbaric in this day and age to be flaring natural gas.

* companies are often optimistic in these kind of news releases

Re: Shale Glut Becomes $2 Diesel Using Gas-to-Liquids Plants
 

just liquefying natural gas into LNG for ship transport consumes 15% of the energy..

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2012...-20121026.html

Re: Shale Glut Becomes $2 Diesel Using Gas-to-Liquids Plants
 

You ethanol lovers will like this.. a new way to produce gasoline, diesel or JetA from corn.. and no energy intensive distillation of the brew is used, if the bugs are effective and fast this could revolutionize biofuels.. but note that butanol is a valuable industrial material:

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2012...-20121107.html

Berkeley researchers integrate ABE fermentation and chemical catalysis to produce bio-hydrocarbon blend stocks from sugars at high yields

"Nevertheless, Blanch said, the process by which the Clostridium bacteria convert sugar or starch to these three chemicals is very efficient. This led him and his laboratory to investigate ways of separating the fermentation products that would use less energy than the common method of distillation.

They discovered that several organic solvents, in particular glyceryl tributyrate (tributyrin), could extract the acetone and butanol from the fermentation broth while not extracting much ethanol. Tributyrin is not toxic to the bacterium and, like oil and water, doesn’t mix with the broth.

Brought together by the EBI, Blanch and Clark found that Toste had discovered a catalytic process that preferred exactly that proportion of acetone, butanol and ethanol to produce a range of hydrocarbons, primarily ketones.

The extractive fermentation process uses less than 10 percent of the energy of a conventional distillation to get the butanol and acetone out—that is the big energy savings. And the products go straight into the chemistry in the right ratios, it turns out.
—Harvey Blanch"