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DOE grant calls for diesel generator fueled by GTL Syntroleum/Marathon gas-to-liquids plant near Tulsa more than half complete; Koniag subsidiary main contractor, fuel tests in Denali Patricia Jones Petroleum News Contributing Writer
Under a U.S. Department of Energy research grant approved this spring, University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers will investigate waste heat recovery techniques in a diesel generator powered by gas-to-liquids fuel.
Work on the two-year, $375,000 research project will be incorporated with an existing $300,000 diesel engine performance test at UAF, and both are included in a $16 million DOE-funded GTL fuel evaluation process.
Most of those DOE funds will cover a portion of construction costs of a GTL demonstration plant in the Port of Catoosa, located just a few miles east of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Syntroleum’s conversion process already proven Industry partners Syntroleum Corporation, which holds a proprietary license for converting natural gas to synthetic fuels, and Marathon Oil are making up the rest of the estimated $36 million cost for the GTL plant.
“This demonstration project, under the DOE contract, is not to demonstrate the technology. The purpose is to produce the fuels and deliver them and demonstrate them in a commercial setting,” Branch Russell said. Russell is Syntroleum’s former director of the Catoosa GTL demonstration program.
Syntroleum’s proprietary conversion process is already proven, he said, and some of the key equipment currently being installed in the Oklahoma plant operated for about a year in the Cherry Point, Washington GTL project, originally operated by ARCO.
Construction of the Oklahoma GTL plant, designed to produce 100 barrels a day of the synthetic, clean-burning diesel and jet fuel, is a little more than 50 percent complete, Russell said. Completion is anticipated in mid-September, with start-up about a month later.
“The opportunity to make our dates is very good. We’ve already run our plant in Cherry Point and it had its break-in travails then,” Russell said. “We anticipate there’s no show stoppers.”
Koniag subsidiary main contractor for project Integrated Concepts and Research Corporation, a subsidiary of Koniag, an Alaska Native corporation based in Kodiak, is the prime contractor for the GTL project.
ICRC will manage the fuel test programs, which involve shipping clean-burning diesel to Washington D.C. and Denali National Park and Preserve for testing in existing diesel fleet vehicles, in addition to the UAF diesel generator tests. ICRC is also conducting cold weather tests in its research facilities in Michigan, said Steve Bergin, ICRC’s project manager.
“Evaluating the fuel is very important piece in the sense that, okay you’ve produced something — what can it be used for? The real thrust of the evaluation side is to demonstrate how great a fuel this is,” he said.
Waste heat tests approve In a competitive evaluation process for DOE funding held in March, the UAF-led diesel engine research project was selected for $125,000 in funding this year, with $250,000 requested for the 2004 fiscal year.
This project will evaluate methods of capturing and using waste heat generated by a 300-kilowatt diesel generator powered by synthetic diesel, said Dennis Witmer, coordinator for UAF’s Arctic Energy Technology Development Laboratory.
Diesel engines design in recent years has increased electrical efficiency but eliminated a portion of waste heat generated, Witmer said. While that heat can be valuable in a stationary generator application — particularly in rural Alaska locations — it can be excessive for vehicle applications.
“This project is designed to figure out a way to recover that heat,” he said. “There’s no reason for engine manufacturers to capture that heat … in stationary applications, when your diesel fuel costs $3 gallon, you can find a use for the heat. By not burning heating oil, you save yourself money.”
The waste heat research, approved this spring by DOE’s Arctic Energy Office of the National Energy Technology Laboratory, will be incorporated in another diesel generator test selected for funding last fall.
That $300,000 research will compare and evaluate diesel engine performance using conventional fuel and the clean-burning GTL product, a project outlined last fall by Dr. Chuen-Sen Lin, assistant professor in UAF’s mechanical engineering department.
“Essentially it’s an add-on project,” Witmer said. “We’re going to combine those two projects in terms of experimentation, and use the same generator.”
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