Posts Tagged ‘Pearl GTL Project’

SEPTEMBER 9, 2011

LONDON (Dow Jones)–Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDSA.LN), Friday confirmed that it has made solid progress in starting up three world-class oil & gas projects in 2011, which at peak will add some 400,000 barrels oil equivalent, and is on track to deliver its strategic targets for 50-80% growth in cash flow from operations from 2009 to 2012.

MAIN FACTS:

-Shell’s three-year strategic plan, outlined in 2010, is building the foundations for profitable growth for shareholders in the future.

-The company is improving near-term competitive performance, and delivering a new wave of production growth.

-Shell’s decision to maintain investment in new projects in the 2009 downturn is driving growth in the company.

-In Canada oil sands, the company has progressed with ramping-up of the expansion project at its Scotford Upgrader, and ASOP-1 recently reached its full production level of 100,000 barrels per day.

-In Qatar, the Qatargas 4 LNG project reached production plateau earlier this year. Ramp up of Train 1 of the Pearl GTL project continues to make good progress, with Train 2 on track for start-up before year- end, as planned.

-These three projects, representing some $30 billion of investment, underpin our targets for financial and production growth to 2012.

-The company is on track to deliver strategic targets for 50-80% growth in cash flow from operations from 2009 to 2012, driven by cost savings, operating performance, and an 11% increase in oil & gas production from one of the most substantial portfolios of new oil & gas projects in the industry Friday.

-Building on this growth, the company has launched 14 further Upstream projects so far in 2010-11, which have a expected peak production of some 400,000 barrels oil equivalent per day for Shell in the medium term, and underpinning the company’s longer-term growth potential.

-In Downstream, as the company completes a major phase of asset sales, it is consolidating this reshaped portfolio, focusing on operating performance, and investing in selective growth, for example recently forming the Ra??zen biofuels and marketing joint venture in Brazil.

-The scale and integration of projects such as Pearl GTL, Ra??zen biofuels and Prelude floating LNG are a solid platform to create long term value for shareholders.

-Shares at 1315 GMT down 10 pence, or 0.5%, at GBP20.49, valuing the company at GBP74.19 billion.

-By Razak Musah Baba, Dow Jones Newswires; 44-20-7842-9275; razak.baba@dowjones.com

SOURCE ARTICLE

Energy Minister Al-Attiyah and Malcolm Brinded of Shell, sign the Pearl GTl Project DPSA

From “Outspoken”, a former employee of Shell Oil USA

John,

I don’t have time to prepare a full blow article for you, so I decided to drop you a note about Shell and its gas investments that will give you an idea as to why Shell is moving toward natural gas as the anchor for its business.

Attached is the link to an article on the Pearl GTL project in Qatar. Shell has an enormous investment in this project and Qatar has some of the greatest natural gas reserves in the world.

Pearl Gas-to-Liquids Project, Ras Laffan – Hydrocarbons Technology

Qatar’s Golden Age

In any event, this will be a huge money maker for Shell in the coming years. So, will other similar projects. Qatar has about 900 tcf of gas reserves. This is about 900 billion bbl of liquids if completely converted. That is a HUGE reserve number. The UAE also has vast gas reserves, as does Iran and Russia.

This makes Qatar a very important long term profit center for Shell. For this reason alone it does not surprise me that Shell is playing the ‘seconding’ game in Qatar and the UAE as they have done in Nigeria.

By Stanley Reed and Robert Tuttle

March 4 (Bloomberg) — Royal Dutch Shell Plc spent $19 billion, triple the original estimate, to build the world’s largest gas-to-liquids plant. Now, it’s pay-off time and the company says the project may generate $6 billion a year.

Shell needs the plant, known as Pearl, to bolster output, which fell for a seventh year in 2009 in part because rebel violence hampered oil ventures in Nigeria. Qatar, the arid Gulf state that’s become the world’s biggest exporter of gas on ships, may account for 10 percent of the company’s production after Pearl and a liquefied natural gas project start deliveries next year.

Shell’s work in Qatar is “like creating a new Nigeria,” Andrew Brown, the company’s executive vice president for the country, said in an interview in the capital, Doha. Pearl will begin processing gas toward the end of this year and start delivering fuel in early 2011, he said.

Gas-to-liquids technology, a relatively expensive way to make diesel and jet fuel, makes more sense given today’s disparity between natural gas and oil prices. Converted into barrels of oil, gas is less than half the price of crude, which doubled to near $80 in the last year. At full capacity, Shell said Pearl will churn out 140,000 barrels a day of liquid fuel and 120,000 barrels equivalent of ethane gas and condensate, a by-product that’s like a light crude oil.

“GTL is a very expensive, energy intensive process,” said Iain Anderson, an analyst at brokers Brewin Dolphin Holdings Plc in London. “But the result you get is fantastic.” Pearl could be paid off in five years, Anderson said.

Airlines, Cars

Since the fuel Pearl will produce is purer than traditional crude-based products, Shell may be able to sell its production at a premium. Pollutants such as sulfur are stripped out of the gas, making it well-suited to green-minded airlines or clean diesel for cars.

Operating costs at Pearl will be about $6 a barrel, Brown said, and the company can reclaim the cost of building the plant through the production-sharing agreement it has with Qatar. With crude at $70 a barrel, Pearl would generate about $6 billion a year in profit for Shell and Qatar, he said.

“GTL starts to make sense when there is a spread between oil and gas prices,” said Ross Cassidy, an analyst at Edinburgh-based Wood Mackenzie Consultants Ltd.

Ras Laffan

Pearl’s webs of tanks and piping sprawl over a 4-square- kilometer (1.5-square-mile) area at Qatar’s Ras Laffan site. An estimated 51,000 workers, their necks draped in cloth to ward off the blazing Gulf sun, weld joints, dig ditches and direct traffic with red and green flags. The workers, mostly men, wear color-coded helmets indicating their roles. White hats are for managers, red for scaffolders, yellow for pipefitters.

Shell project engineer Wiliam Keij said that the start-up will last for months as unit after unit is fired up. At the heart of Pearl will be twenty-four 1,200-metric-ton reactor vessels filled with pipes where gas will be converted into paraffin through interaction with catalysts. The paraffin then flows on into refinery-like units where it will be broken down into kerosene for jet fuel, gasoil for diesel, naphtha for plastics and base oils for lubricants.

The technology and energy required to make gas-to-liquids work mean it has rarely been used to bring natural gas resources to consumers. The 34,000-barrel-a-day Oryx GTL, Qatar’s only operating gas-to-liquids plant, reached full power last year after hitting snags following its start in 2006. Oryx is a venture between state-controlled Qatar Petroleum and South Africa’s Sasol Ltd.

Ironed Out Kinks

Shell said it has ironed out a lot of the kinks of gas- to-liquids at a smaller plant it’s operated in Malaysia since 1993. Bintulu, which had early glitches, has been generating about $200 million a year in earnings. At 14,700 barrels a day, Bintulu is only about a 10th of the size of Pearl.

Alongside Pearl, Shell has a 30 percent stake in Qatargas 4, part of the world’s largest LNG complex, due to start exports in 2011. With oil prices at $70 a barrel, the two projects should generate more than $4 billion a year for Shell after revenue sharing with Qatar, Brown said.

Last year, Shell had a net income of $12.5 billion as New York oil futures averaged $62.09 a barrel. The company’s oil and gas production averaged the equivalent of 3.15 million barrels a day, according to company filings on Bloomberg.

In Nigeria, Shell’s share of production for its onshore fields dropped to 150,000 barrels a day after an oil spill shut a pipeline, Chief Financial Officer Simon Henry said last month. At full capacity, output from the fields is more than 350,000 barrels a day.

When Pearl and Qatargas 4 are both up and running they will add 350,000 barrels a day to Shell’s total production.

–Editors: Will Kennedy, Amanda Jordan

Mar/04/2010 00:01 GMT

To contact the reporters on this story: Stanley Reed in Doha, Qatar on sreed13@bloomberg.net; Robert Tuttle in Doha, Qatar at rtuttle@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Will Kennedy at wkennedy3@bloomberg.net.

SOURCE ARTICLE

LONDON (Dow Jones)–Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDSA) said Monday it was making good progress with the Pearl GTL and the Qatargas 4 projects in Qatar.

proactiveinvestors.com

Monday, November 23, 2009

Dutch oil supermajor Royal Dutch Shell (LSE: RDSB) updated the market on its progress in Qatar, where  it is developing the Pearl GTL and Qatargas 4 projects in cooperation with state owned Qatar Petroleum, which operates all oil and gas activities in the country. While Pearl GTL was progressing in line with expectations, the US$ 8 billion Qatargas 4 project has been delayed by 10 months with startup now planned for late 2010.

The company has now entered into the testing phase at Pearl GTL, having inaugurated the plant’s control room that comprises about 1,000 control cabinets hosting 179 servers programmed with 12 million lines of software code.

Testing will begin on the equipment that has already been installed at the plant with the rest of it still being under construction.

The construction schedule and budget were in line with expectations, the company said in the statement. Major construction at both Pearl and Qatargas 4 is scheduled to conclude by the end of 2010, with production ramp up from late 2010 into 2011. These deadlines represent a 10 month delay from Qatargas’ previously planned startup date.

Pearl is expected to reach 320,000 boe/d, while Qatargas 4 is expected to reach 280,000 boe/d.

Pearl GTL will use Shell’s proprietary Gas-to-Liquids (GTL) technology to convert some 1.6 bfc/d (billion cubic feet per day) of gas into clean burning oil products like gasoil, high specification lubricants base oils and chemicals feedstock, which are normally produced by oil refineries. The project is designed to produce 120,000 bbld (barrels per day) of natural gas liquids (NGLs) and ethane, and 140,000 bbld of GTL products.

All of the development costs of Pearl GTL are being covered by Shell.

The Qatargas 4 project is designed to convert 1.4 bcf/d of natural gas into liquefied natural gas (LNG) and NGLs, adding to Shell’s current LNG capacity of 18.5 million tonnes per year (mtpa). The project is expected to have a capacity of 7.8 mtpa of LNG and 70,000 boe/d (barrels of oil equivalent per day) of NGLs.

Shell has a 30% stake in Qatargas 4 with Qatar Petroleum holding the remaining stake in the project.

“I am very pleased with the progress that we are making with Pearl GTL and Qatargas 4…on today’s basis these two projects alone would represent over 10% of our world-wide production. Qatar underpins Shell’s growth plans to 2012 and will be a heartland for decades to come,” said Chief Executive of Shell Peter Vosier.

SOURCE ARTICLE

In the light of the information printed below, how can anyone be expected to believe anything Shell says…

ARTICLE PUBLISHED TODAY BY THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

NOVEMBER 23, 2009, 10:22 A.M. ET

THE BS:

Shell Pearl GTL Project To Cost $18B-$19B, In Line With Budget

LONDON (Dow Jones)–Royal Dutch Shell PLC’s (RDSB.LN) Pearl GTL in Qatar is expected to cost $18 billion to $19 billion, in line with its planned budget, a spokeswoman said Monday, underscoring progress made by the company in controlling its costs.

The news contrasts with the disclosure four years ago by the Anglo-Dutch oil company that costs at a giant Russian liquefied natural gas plant had doubled to $20 billion.

-By Benoit Faucon, Dow Jones Newswires; +44-20-7842-9266; benoit.faucon@dowjones.com

WSJ ARTICLE

THE TRUTH

COMMENT POSTED ON SHELL BLOG BY AN EAGLE EYED SHELL INSIDER

guest1
on Nov 23rd, 2009 at 4:56 pm

Shell started experimenting with GTL technology during the energy crisis of the 1970s, when it began to search for an alternative to gasoline. In 1993, Shell opened its first GTL demonstration plant in Bintulu, Malaysia. The project was derailed in 1997 by a massive explosion caused by a profusion of carbon molecules in the air as a result of extensive forest fires in Indonesia. It took three years to repair the damage.

Pearl GTL is a joint venture between Qatar Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell and represents Shell’s single biggest equity investment anywhere in the world. Estimates for the total cost of the project vary between $12billion and $18 billion, up from an original $5 billion.

Shell Qatar chairman Andrew Brown said, “Safety is a key priority for us. If we can’t be safe, we don’t operate. Every day our concern is the safety of the 35,000 people working at our Pearl GTL work site.”

The complex, jointly owned by Qatar Petroleum (QP) and Shell, was inaugurated by Qatar Electricity and Water Company’s general manager Fahad Hamad al-Mohannadi. Royal Dutch Shell’s executive director Linda Cook, diplomats and senior QP and Shell executives were among those present.