A micro-refinery to reduce associated natural gas flaring

Gas flaring accelerates climate change with greenhouse gases but also harms the environment with other pollutants such as H2S, carbon sulfides, NOx and metals. Methane is a valuable energy vector and converting the associated gas from thousands of wells to liquid fuels would reduce the environmental footprint of oil field operations. Micro-gas-to-liquids technology (GtL) reduces flared natural gas and emissions while producing valuable diesel. Integrating a high pressure syngas step with Fischer-Tropsch (FT) in a single vessel reduces investment and operating costs, which is now an insurmountable hurdle that face producers exploiting wells far from gas pipeline infrastructure. We have demonstrated that coupling these two technologies produces C7+ liquid. Furthermore, the high pressure POX reactor can convert 96% of the methane while producing a H2/CO ratio of 2, which is ideal for FT, at 900 °C. With a capacity of 100 MCF d−1, one micro-refinery unit can reduce CO2 emissions by1.2 kt y−1.