GTL innovation produces clean base oils from natural gas

S. Gullapalli and A. Falender, Shell Global Solutions, Houston, Texas The idea to produce base oil for lubricant applications using natural gas as the hydrocarbon source was developed 40 years ago at the Shell Technology Center in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Several years later, the reaction was optimized in a laboratory bench-scale reactor. During the 1980s and 1990s, this reaction was scaled up to a pilot plant and then to a small commercial plant. During this development process, several optimizations were made and captured in more than 3,500 patents. This innovation culminated into a commercial reality with the opening of the world-scale Pearl GTL plant in Qatar in 2011 (Fig. 1). Pearl