Sasol announces GTL project in U.S.A.

South Africa’s Sasol Ltd. will begin engineering and design work on a 96,000-barrel-per-day (bpd) gas-to-liquids (GTL) plant in Westlake, Louisiana, in what could be the first such plant in North America.
It will be the second-largest plant of its kind in the world, after Royal Dutch Shell’s Pearl plant in Qatar, which has a capacity of 140,000 bpd.
The facility, which is estimated to cost about US$14 billion, would convert low-cost natural gas into clean-burning diesel fuel. Sasol said it will make a final investment decision on the plant in 2014, after the engineering and design review is finished. Production is scheduled to begin in 2018.
Sasol estimated that the plant would create at least 1,200 permanent jobs and 7,000 construction jobs. The state encouraged the project with more than US$2 billion worth of tax credits and other incentives.
Meanwhile, the company said that a GTL plant to be built in Alberta, Canada, will be delayed for at least a year. The company had been expected to make a decision by the end of December on whether to proceed with a US$200-million front-end engineering and design study of the proposed project — if successful, construction could have started as early as 2015 and would be concluded in about four years.
Sasol is a pioneer in GTL technology; it has a joint venture project in Qatar known as Oryx GTL, with a nameplate capacity of 32,400 bpd. At the core of Sasol’s GTL technology is the Sasol Slurry Phase Distillate Process™ (SPD process). This is a three-stage process, which combines three leading proprietary technologies. In the first stage, natural gas is combined with oxygen to form a syngas. Syngas is then subjected to a Fischer-Tropsch conversion to produce waxy syncrude. In the final stage, syncrude is cracked down to produce final products.