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Strategies & Market Trends : SASOL LTD. (SASOY)
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To: IPOJunkie who wrote (18)5/20/1998 8:01:00 PM
From: John M  Read Replies (1) of 27
 
IPO,

You have a very inquisitive mind. Process engineering is a lot of fun but eventualy they make you a manager and it screws everything up. But anyway..

Typical impurities in natural gas include H2S, CO2, N2, Mercaptans (misc. sulfur compounds).

N2 can just go through the process and hopefully is in a low enough percentage that the tail gas off one of these plants can still be burnt. Usually this one is less than 1% and poses no additional costs.

H2S and CO2 are removed upstream of the gasifier using an amine plant most likely MDEA, DEA, Sulfinol "M" or MEA. These amines remove both the H2S and CO2 and in some cases the mercaptans from the gas. The tail gas from the amine plant will go to a claus sulfur plant. The claus unit converts the H2S and mercaptans to molten sulfur which can be sold separately (not worth much sometimes nothing).

I just priced a plant to remove 1% H2S, 3% CO2 and 300 ppm mercaptan from 50,000 mscfd of natural gas. The price for the plant was $30 million. They cost about 10 cents/mscf to run after construction as long as they are fully loaded. This will add about $1/bbl of syncrude to the operating costs. SASOL believes the operating costs to be $5/bbl without impurities so adds 20% to operating costs.

With the impurities removed, cobalt catalyst works fine and actually significantly better than iron catalyst for the remaining natural gas. Sasol will use colbalt on all of their new projects because it is more economic.

I hope that helps

JCM
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