21-08-2013

Technip and Sasol form a front-end engineering alliance for GTL facilities

Technip and Sasol, the owner of the world’s leading gas-to-liquids* (GTL) technology, announce that they have established an alliance for front-end engineering services for future Sasol GTL projects. Furthermore, it also allows for Technip’s participation during the execution stage of future GTL projects. This alliance, which builds on existing relationships, aims to achieve industry leading capital productivity, through the highest standards of HSE, operability, accelerated innovation and reduced project cycle times. 

GTL technology is a process for converting natural gas into petroleum products such as naphtha and diesel fuel. These fuels are very clean with effectively no pollution-causing sulfur or aromatic hydrocarbons. The high cetane number of the diesel fuel will help meet future more stringent specifications. GTL technology is becoming increasingly important not only for the environmental advantages of its products, but also because it provides an efficient and safe solution for the transportation of natural gas. A large portion of gas reserves are considered unusable or “stranded” because they are too far from consumers and difficult to transport. GTL offers a way to convert stranded gas into petroleum products that can be transported and sold using conventional tankers, pipelines, storage facilities and retail distribution systems.

As the reference and main execution center at Technip for GTL, the operating center in Rome, Italy will be in charge of the management of the alliance including the strengthening of the long standing relationship between the Technip Stone & Webster Process Technology center in Boston, Massachusetts with Sasol Technology for the hydrocarbon synthesis technology section.