Syntroleum’s GTL technology uses air in the process, rather than requiring oxygen, enabling the physical plant to be more compact and economical.

A number of factors and developments are coming into alignment for the company, which has spent 20 years, invested $200 million, and generated 127 patents (US and non-US; issued and pending) in developing its technology.

With global demand for oil and refined oil products pushing hard against supplies (and with more doubt emerging about the ability of traditional oil producers to meet that demand in the future), the Gas-to-Liquids approach is increasingly economically viable, and of interest. Because GTL delivers an end-product, such as Fischer-Tropsch diesel, the process actually addresses two points of constraint: crude oil supply and refining capacity.

As a corollary to GTL, interests in Coal-to-Liquids technologies are rapidly increasing. Syntroleum is now investigating the potential application of its GTL approach in CTL. (More on that below.)

Syntroleum has made some significant enhancements to its core process as instantiated at the Catoosa demonstration plant.

• A significant improvement to the autothermal reformer that converts natural gas to syngas makes the systems more scalable, with higher capacity, at lower cost.

• A new Fischer-Tropsch wax filter is higher performance than its predecessor.

• A newer catalyst is more attrition-resistant. After 2,000 hours of tests, the new catalyst showed no visible signs of attrition.

• A modified Fischer-Tropsch reactor provides a 20% increase in velocity. Syntroleum is currently making modifications that can provide a further 50% increase in velocity. The net of all of this work is the potential to deliver a compact, single-train GTL capacity of greater than 30,000 barrels per day.

Syntroleum’s strategic focus is smaller fields of stranded natural gas—fields of less than 5 Tcf in size, that do not have large—and highly expensive—GTL or LNG plants associated with them, or pipelines. Syntroleum’s more compact technology is more mobile, and in theory can be more economically deployed to these distributed—and stranded—resources.

The company is currently in the process of building a GTL barge that it will deploy in its Aje project in Nigeria later this year.

Coal-to-Liquids. GTL technology is an offshoot of the 80-year-old Coal-to-Liquid technology originally developed by Fischer and Tropsch in Germany, but success in GTL is now coming back to fuel interest in CTL.

On its quarterly results conference call, Syntroleum management indicated that there is a serious increase in the interest and in the number of proposals being brought to it on CTL projects (more than 10 so far this year, from the US, Australia and China). Accordingly, Syntroleum is viewing CTL as an added opportunity, and one that it will investigate, but not at the expense of its primary focus on GTL.

One of the key areas for investigation is the various gasification technologies that would be required to gasify the coal—and also the processes for the associated clean-up of the gas to ensure its compatibility with the catalyst.

Economics for CTL bounce all over the place, based on the differences from one area to another. Presumably, with its compact, modular, and more easily distributed footprint, Syntroleum technology would be more economical to deploy closer to certain coalfields (hence, the interest.)

Of note, though, and of great interest to Syntroleum is the provision—currently in the Senate version of the energy bill, but one that may survive into the combined package—of a tax credit of $0.50 per gallon for coal-to-liquid-based fuel. That’s a subsidy of $21 a barrel, and that will certainly make CTL fuel economically more attractive and competitive.