Calumet Specialty Products Partners on Thursday announced plans to expand its Karns City, Pa., specialty products facility to include a 1,000 barrel per day gas-to-liquids plant.
The plant design is expected to be completed by late 2012, followed by site engineering and a decision to commence fabrication in the first half of 2013. Production is expected to begin in the second half of 2014.
Calumet commissioned Ventech Engineers, which makes modular petroleum processing plants, to design and deliver the GTL plant using an autothermal reformer (ATR) from Haldor Topsoe and Fischer-Tropsch technology marketed under the Velocys brand name by U.K.-based Oxford Catalysts. The ATR technology reforms natural gas into synthesis gas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Fischer-Tropsch technology converts natural gas to liquids.
Calumet intends to use the [Fischer-Tropsch] products as feedstock for the production of ultra-high quality specialty products, according to Oxford Catalysts separate announcement on Friday. Calumet intends to provide the majority, if not all of the funding for this project… Any remaining funding will be provided by Calumets other project partners.
The GTL plant will be constructed as truckable modules by Ventech in Pasadena, Texas, and then transported to Calumets site in Karns City for installation within the existing refining facility.
Converting natural gas into ultra-high quality feedstock through GTL will reduce our costs, increase security of supply and improve product quality, said Bill Grube, vice chairman and CEO of Indianapolis-based Calumet.
Stephen Ames, principal of SBA Consulting, Pepper Pike, Ohio, said that, from the brief announcement made, it sounds as if the GTL module will only contain the syn gas and a Fischer-Tropsch reactors. That will produce long-chain waxy distillates. If so, that distillate will then have to be further processed by hydrocracking or severe hydrotreating in order to produce fuel products (naphtha, jet fuel and diesel) and an unconverted bottoms stream for possible base oil manufacture.
Ames noted that Karns City does not have a hydrocracker although it does have a hydrotreater for making white oils. If Calumet plans to use the GTL process for base oil manufacture, they will have to move the distillate to a location where they can dewax or hydroisomerise the base oil feedstock, he told Lube Report. That could be Shreveport, La., where Calumet has an 11,900 b/d base oil plant.
Karns City, however, is ideally located in the midst of the Marcellus shale oil field and hence inexpensive natural gas is and will be plentiful, Ames continued. They have the space at Karns City for the modular unit. Even if base oils are not in their plans, it is an inexpensive means to produce fuels or their precursors. If they do intend to produce base oils, it would not be a large quantity. Only about 30 percent of the waxy distillate could be converted to base oil. That works out to about 300 barrels per day or 15,000 metric tons per year.