BP to close GTL demo plant by year end

Kristen Nelson

Petroleum News

BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc. said Sept. 2 that it has successfully completed its gas-to-liquids demonstration project at Nikiski and will close the facility by the end of the year.

BP said the project has proved the company’s GTL process to make diesel and jet fuel from natural gas can be scaled up from the laboratory and operated safely and reliably.

“We have learned a great deal from the Nikiski test facility,” said BP Alaska President John Minge in a statement. “The technologies developed and improved there will eventually play a role in meeting the world’s growing demand for cleaner fuels.”

BP announced plans to build the 300-barrel-a-day test facility in 2000 and production of synthetic crude oil at the facility began in July 2003. BP said when first production began that it represented a significant milestone for BP and Davy Process Technology, partners in the new technologies being tested at the plant.

In its Sept. 2 statement on completion of work at the demonstration plant BP said its GLT development program will continue in Europe where the company is working with Davy Process Technology on the engineering design of full scale GTL units.

At startup BP thought proving up the technology would take 12 to 18 months. In January 2006 the plant’s operations manager said the plant would continue to operate as long as its work added value to BP’s worldwide GTL initiatives.

There are three steps in the GTL process at the Nikiski plant: reforming natural gas and steam into syngas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide; using a Fischer-Tropsch reactor to string syngas components into long-chain hydrocarbons; and cracking those long-chain hydrocarbons into shorter-chain hydrocarbons to form syncrude.

The syncrude can be refined into products such as diesel fuel.

BP has been pioneering new technologies to improve economics of the process, a compact gas reformer and a proprietary catalytic process in the Fischer-Tropsch reactor. Because the compact reformer is smaller than traditional reformers development costs are reduced.

Some 3 million cubic feet per day of natural gas are converted into 300 barrels per day of syncrude at the Nikiski plant; the syncrude is trucked to the Tesoro refinery in Nikiski for refining.

BP said the decision affects some 15 BP employees, who will be offered positions elsewhere within BP. In addition to the BP employees, some 10 contract employees work at the facility.