Greyrock to build small-scale gas-to-liquids plant near Houston

6 November 2014

Greyrock Energy, a company transforming natural gas into premium transportation fuels (earlier post), announced a final investment decision (FID) to build a small-scale Gas-to-Liquids (GTL) facility near Houston, Texas. The plant will be commercially operational by the end of 2015.

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Greyrock targets midstream operators and producers who can profit by transforming abundant, low-cost natural gas into higher-value transportation fuels without the costly, large-scale processes that are typical with traditional GTL solutions. The project is being funded by a consortium of investors led by Dallas based Sterling Private Capital and Eagle Oil Gas Co.

Greyrock’s facilities produce primarily premium synthetic diesel fuel from natural gas or natural gas liquids using the company’s GreyCat catalyst and Distributed GTL (dGTL) solution. Greyrock says that the proprietary GreyCat catalyst—which is not a traditional Fischer-Tropsch catalyst—directly converts syngas into diesel fuel with high selectivity and eliminates the FT wax upgrading stage. This reduces the complexity and cost associated with small-scale GTL plants, allowing Greyrock to scale down its systems to small modular units that can be sited in areas where other, larger projects would not be cost effective.

Modular gas conversion can be achieved from a variety of abundant gas sources, including natural gas, natural gas liquids (such as ethane), stranded gas resources and associated gas.

In addition to conversion of natural gas into fuels, we are very excited about the opportunity to convert NGLs, especially ethane, in geographies where ethane pricing is depressed and a challenge for producers to deal with.