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Gold/Mining/Energy : Gasification Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dennis Roth who wrote (1431)	7/10/2008 9:40:01 AM
From: Dennis Roth	Respond to of 1740

Sasol says optimising output at Qatar GTL plant Tue Jul 1, 2008 6:10pm BST uk.reuters.com MADRID, July 1 (Reuters) - South Africa's Sasol (SOLJ.J: Quote, Profile, Research), the world's biggest maker of motor oil from coal, said on Tuesday it expected output to exceed design capacity at Oryx gas-to-liquids (GTL) joint venture plant in Qatar. "We've gone beyond ramp-up and are in the optimisation phase," Group General Manager Lean Strauss said on the sidelines of the World Petroleum Congress in Madrid. Strauss added that revised production figures for Oryx would be published in a twice-yearly investment insight due in July. Oryx, the world's biggest GTL plant, which produces both ultra low sulphur diesel and naphtha, had average daily output for the six months of 2008 of 9,000 barrels per day (bpd). Strauss confirmed that another GTL project in Nigeria had suffered from cost over-runs and delays, and was now scheduled for completion in 2011. He said that plans to build coal-to-liquids (CTL) plants were going ahead in the United States and India, but were most advanced in China. In China, feasibility studies were expected to be completed in 2009, and the plants themselves expected to start up in 2015 or 2016. Strauss said Sasol's Project Mafutha study in South Africa to build an 80,000 CTL plant was still in the "pre-feasibility phase." "We're optimistic. We know what we've done in South Africa, we're the world leader in CTL, we've got coal, but we're going to do our planning properly before we start construction," he said. Sasol, South Africa's third-biggest producer of coal after BHP Billiton (BILJ.J: Quote, Profile, Research) and Anglo American (AGLJ.J: Quote, Profile, Research), uses coal to make motor and industrial fuels that supply 35 percent of the fuel needs of Africa's biggest economy. Sasol's coal mines at Secunda produce about 40 million tonnes of coal a year. (Reporting by Martin Roberts; Editing by James Jukwey) © Thomson Reuters 2008 All rights reserved.