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Competition in the GTL area is very intense. The stakes are extraordinary. Several large corporations have spent and continue to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to bring this technology to commercialization because of its huge market potential. Most of the companies developing GTL technology are doing so primarily for their own use and have not been inclined to release details of their economics, though there are individualized numbers scattered through the literature. Getting a complete picture of the economics of one company's technology is very difficult at best, and making economic comparisons between companies all the more uncertain. To add further complication, technology development continues to progress to improve efficiencies and economics, making comparisons a moving target.
An article was published in the Oil and Gas Journal, March 2001, in which data from a study comparing six Fischer-Tropsch technologies was presented. The author of the study recommended that the technologies be re-evaluated for the larger plant sizes "...given the rapid rate of evolution in current designs." Nevertheless, the study is "...one of the better comparisons of competing technologies..." Some of the economic data from the article is presented below. For each technology listed, the top % IRR value is for a smaller plant than the bottom % IRR value. The new Synfuels GTL technology did not exist at the time of the study or article. The Synfuels Process numbers are included in the table at right for comparison.
As can be seen in the table, the new Synfuels technology achieves equivalent or higher returns than any of the others at a fraction of their size. Furthermore, the Synfuels plant size evaluated has not been optimized to try to reap the benefits of economies of scale, but rather was chosen to show that GTL was viable to the multitude of natural gas fields too small to support the mega plants of the FT technologies.
The value of the Synfuels technology has been validated at our plant in Texas and by economic and process models, as well as the experience of Marvin Johnson, Senior Fellow Emeritus of Phillips Petroleum and a Fellow of the American Institute of Engineers.
Due diligence has been performed on the Synfuels technology by several different world class scientists representing separate investors and the reports produced were very positive.
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