By Kristen Hays
HOUSTON, April 1 (Reuters) - A San Francisco company thathas come up with a less expensive technology to convert naturalgas to gasoline, diesel and other liquids is seeking to put itto use on a larger commercial scale.
Siluria Technologies uses a catalyst to convert methane intoethylene, a building block for petrochemicals, and then anothercatalyst to turn that into liquids, primarily gasoline, ChiefExecutive Ed Dineen said in an interview this week.
"It's a technology the industry has long sought after," saidDineen, who was formerly chief operating officer of chemicalscompany LyondellBasell Industries NV.
With backing from Saudi Aramco and partnerships withwell-known industry players including the Linde Group and Brazilian petrochemical company Braskem, Dineenhopes to break into natural gas processing with improvementsthat make the decades-old technology economical.
A less expensive way to turn natural gas into motor fuelscould potentially benefit consumers, as natural gas is farcheaper and more plentiful than crude oil.
Abundant domestic natural gas from the shale boom promptedplans by Royal Dutch Shell and South Africanpetrochemicals company Sasol for gas-to-liquidsprojects that use a different process, known as Fischer-Tropsch.
But Shell in 2013 shelved a potential gas-to-liquids plantin Louisiana when the cost spiked to $20 billion, and Sasol inJanuary delayed its final decision on whether to build a similarproject in the same state after oil prices tumbled.
Fischer-Tropsch has high start-up and operating costs thatinvolve breaking natural gas apart into a synthetic gas, whichcan be converted into liquids, Dineen said.
He worked on that technology three decades ago with Arco inAlaska, where natural gas from the Prudhoe Bay oilfield wasstranded because of a lack of pipeline infrastructure to move itto markets.
Among the challenges were the need to operate at such hightemperatures that safety and costs became a concern, saidDineen. Also, some catalysts worked the first time but then fellapart, he said.
Innovations including nanowire technology to test catalystsquickly speeds up trial-and-error testing, making it moreefficient to find what works at a more affordable cost, Dineensaid.
Siluria has been testing the technology at Californiafacilities for several years, and more recently at Braskem'sdemonstration plant in La Porte, near Houston. The company aimsto commercialize it by 2017. (Editing by Terry Wade and Matthew Lewis)
