Carbon Sciences has announced plans to produce samples of diesel fuel derived from natural gas and carbon dioxide in a demonstration facility. The refinery will utilize its catalyst technology to produce syngas that can then be converted into gasoline and other fuels using conventional Fischer-Tropsch (“FT”) gas-to-liquids (“GTL”) technology.
The company believes that of varying technologies to produce syngas from natural gas, a method of dry reforming using CO2, is the best approach due to lower projected capital and operating costs. The Carbon Sciences team also believes its technology has solved the problem of a lack of commercial catalyst robust enough to sustain dry reforming reactions on an industrial scale. With the completion of 2,000 hours of lab testing and 600 hours of commercial testing, Carbon Sciences says its catalyst has been proven to work continuously at high conversion efficiency and is the most robust catalyst available today for dry forming of methane.
“After achieving very positive commercial test results for our catalyst, we are moving ahead aggressively to accelerate the production of larger quantities of the catalyst, as well as completing the technical and economic analyses in preparation for discussions with strategic partners,” said Byron Elton, CEO of Carbon Sciences. “Working with the GTL experts at our engineering firm, Emerging Fuels Technology, we also plan to demonstrate an end-to-end process that will produce samples of diesel fuel that can be used by existing diesel vehicles.”
Elton continued, “Our diesel fuel will have the same characteristics as conventional petroleum based diesel fuel. However, our fuel will burn cleaner than conventional petroleum based diesel fuel simply because it is molecularly manufactured from natural gas and carbon dioxide, without the contaminants found in petroleum based diesel. Making samples of clean burning diesel is just one of the ways we intend to demonstrate our breakthrough technology.”
Carbon Sciences’ robust dry reforming technology does not require the use of a capital-intensive air separation unit, and the company believes it has the potential to successfully enable FT technology and change the course of the transportation fuels industry.