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The New Energy Future
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Focus on Gas to Liquids (GTL)
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Focus on Snake Well Drill
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Films and Games
History of GTL
The story of Shell's development of Gas to Liquids (GTL) over thirty years.
Slide 1
After the oil crisis of the early 1970s, the creative minds at Shell started asking themselves some challenging questions. What if you could make a fuel from something that burned cleaner than oil and was even more plentiful? What if we could use gas? But how could we turn it into a fuel that ran in regular engines?
Slide 2
Turning gas into liquid fuel had been done in the laboratory, but many experts had doubts as to whether this could be done on a commercial scale. Shell thought differently, inventing a whole new industrial process and registering thousands of associated patents. Shell started the first GTL pilot plant in Amsterdam in 1983.
Slide 3
Pioneering research in Amsterdam revealed that GTL Fuel was far cleaner burning than conventional fuel. The Shell team swiftly realised that some of this benefit could be translated to vehicle engine combustion and thus could have a great advantage in helping to improve air quality in the world’s increasingly crowded cities.
Slide 4
Shell started the world’s first commercial GTL plant of its type in Bintulu, Malaysia in 1993.
Slide 5
But in December 1997 Shell’s huge investment in the project was nearly lost when the plant was hit by a serious explosion. Thankfully, detailed investigations revealed that the explosion was not caused by any part of the GTL process itself, but by smoke particles from local forest fires building up in the plant’s Air Separation Unit.
Slide 6
Shell was confident enough in the technology to set about rebuilding the plant immediately. The plant was rebuilt in record time, within budget and with a safety achievement of 5.3 million man hours without any lost-time-injury. By 2003 Bintulu was capable of producing 14,700 barrels of GTL Fuel per day – and Shell was ready to take GTL to the next level.
Slide 7
In July 2006, Shell announced the launch of the world’s largest GTL project in Qatar. The Pearl GTL plant will be ten times the size of Bintulu, capable of producing 140,000 barrels per day of high quality GTL fuels and products, and 120,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day of condensate, liquefied petroleum gas and ethane.
Slide 8
The plant is the product of 30 years of research, development and innovation. As Qatar holds a significant proportion of the world’s natural gas resources, the plant could be producing cleaner, versatile GTL Fuel for many years to come.
