Lowering the Bar to Methanol Production

Rigzone: What do you consider "smaller-scale"?

Aulich: Smallest scale will enable accommodation of produced gas from an individual oil well – a flow rate as low as 300,000 cubic feet per day.

Rigzone: What do you consider the most exciting potential technologies that could emerge from EERC and FCE's partnership?

Aulich: GTL technologies that are sufficiently simple – to ship, set up and operate – to enable their commercially viable deployment wherever a gas supply is available.

Rigzone: What do you foresee as the conventional means of supplying natural gas to your electrochemical cell?

Aulich: Pipeline.

Rigzone: How might EC-GTL be adapted to run on landfill gas or flare gas?

Aulich: There would be some clean-up required to ensure against introducing any catalyst-killing contaminants, such as sulfur compounds, into the electrochemical cell. Removing sulfur from gas feeds to very low levels is a well-established process used on existing FCE power plants.    

Rigzone: Are you strictly looking at developing GTL technology that can monetize natural gas on a smaller scale?

Aulich: No. Once technology is optimized, commercialized and packaged in units of modular electrochemical cells of varying methane throughput and methanol production capacity, the cells will be "stackable" like individual fuel cells, which will enable achieving larger overall plant sizes as needed.

Rigzone: What do you consider the primary benefits of using modular units for EC-GTL?

Aulich: Since it is driven by the chemical energy of oxidation, EC-GTL is anticipated to require minimal energy input and may yield added value in the form of electricity and high-grade heat by-products. The size and self-contained nature of each modular EC-GTL unit will enable transport of units as needed to accommodate evolving gas-processing needs. This transportability would be advantageous in EC-GTL application to associated gas produced at North Dakota and other oil wells, where gas yields typically decline from an initial maximum at the onset of oil production to roughly 30 percent of initial maximum after about 18 months of production.

Rigzone: What impact do you believe EC-GTL could have on the broader methanol market?

Aulich: In addition to smaller-scale distributed applications, EC-GTL has the potential for extreme disruption of the methanol market via its application to large-scale methanol production. EC-GTL advantages versus traditional large-scale (25,000 barrels per day) SMR-based methanol plants include higher carbon efficiency, the possibility of an electricity by-product and a high-purity carbon dioxide waste stream that can be recovered at low cost for use in enhanced oil recovery and other applications. Also, while turn-down of an SMR-based methanol plant results in a significant efficiency penalty, the modularity of an EC-GTL plant would enable sub-capacity operation without sacrificing efficiency. In addition to methanol producers, large EC-GTL plant customers would include oil and gas refiners interested in methanol as an intermediate in production of gasoline and/or chemicals, use of methanol in gas processing and/or hydraulic fracturing operations, and use of carbon dioxide in enhanced oil recovery, all of which could have significant relevance to improving the efficiency and competitiveness of North Dakota (and other state) oil and gas production and in-state value-added processing.

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