GTL: Alaska testing in tour buses planned for new diesel fuel

by The Associated Press

An environmentally friendly diesel fuel made from natural gas will be tested in tourist buses at Denali National Park and Preserve and in a diesel generator similar to the ones used in Alaska’s remote villages.

The fuel has no sulfur, unlike conventional diesel, and no carcinogens such as benzene and toluene, which are the major toxins in fuel spills. It’s similar to the paraffins used to seal the tops of canning jars in earlier days and still used as food additives.

Alaska villages burn diesel fuel 24 hours a day to generate electricity, using 95 percent of the diesel consumed in the state. Using the new fuel in those plants could reduce emissions and make spills less toxic, said Dennis Witmer, a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who’s coordinating the generator tests.

Ordinary diesel fuel has too much sulfur to use catalytic converters like the ones in gasoline-powered cars. But new federal standards call for the sulfur content in diesel to be cut to 15 parts per million, a level low enough that converters will work.

Just what U.S. refineries will do to meet that standard isn’t clear, but the sulfur-free fuel from the “gas-to-liquids” process, or GTL, could potentially be blended in to cut the overall sulfur concentration.

That’s only going to happen, however, if oil companies that have been experimenting with the process for decades can bring down the cost.

Studies by the Energy Department in the late 1990s concluded that crude would have to sell for about $30 a barrel for the product to be worth producing on the North Slope and shipping down the trans-Alaska oil pipeline. A plant to do that would likely cost more than $1 billion to build.

Still, BP PLC is nearing completion on an $86 million demonstration plant in Nikiski, near Anchorage, to try out its technology. BP executives say the 300-barrel-a-day project is the final step before a commercial operation, though it has not committed to such a plant.

The fuel for Witmer’s tests and the bus testing at Denali will be made at a demonstration plant being built near Tulsa, then shipped north. Witmer is getting 15,000 to 20,000 gallons, he said, and the Denali buses will burn about 10,000 to 12,000 gallons more.

Some of the fuel will also go to Washington, D.C., for testing in that city’s bus fleet.

The Denali bus testing will only involve two or three buses.

The Tulsa plant is expected to start producing fuel next summer, and “we’re hoping to start the test on the clean fuel in August and go into the fall and winter,” he said.