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Sumitomo Corporation is plaesed to announce its strategic partnership agreement signed on May 15, 2012 with UK-based CompactGTL plc (CGTL), Sumitomo Precision Products Co., Ltd. (SPP) and Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Ltd. (KHI) for manufacture and supply of the reactor blocks for CompactGTL and execution of the reactor modularisation for its modular gas to liquids commercial scale plants.
Following the conclusion of the four-company agreement, KHI acquired the same number of CGTL shares in the end of May 2012 as owned by Sumitomo Corporation since 2010, positioning the two companies to hold equal interest within the partnership scheme. The four partners will bring individual strengths together to drive the business forward.
Until recently, oil development in remote or deep water locations has been plagued by natural gas produced as waste, as no adequate technology has been developed for its effective use or appropriate disposal. The most conventional way of disposing of the gas, simply burning it off, is becoming increasingly unacceptable from economical, political and environmental standpoints, and there has been a need to develop an effective method for transforming this troublesome "associated gas" into a usable resource.
The CompactGTL technology has been developed to convert this associated gas into synthetic crude oil using catalytic mini-channel reactors. CompactGTL is the only company in the world to have a fully integrated, operating modular GTL facility that has also been industry approved for commercial deployment.
In July 2008 Petrobras confirmed a contract with CompactGTL for a funded GTL demonstration plant, which was required to confirm all aspects needed for commercial application. The GTL demonstration plant was commissioned at Petrobras' Aracaju site in Brazil in December 2010 with successful start-up post commissioning. In January 2012 CompactGTL announced the successful conclusion of the facility testing by Petrobras. The technology has now been approved by Petrobras as ready for commercial deployment, and the extensive testing has been successful in proving the facility to be operable and robust.
This approval facilitates broader adoption of the CompactGTL technology that can provide much sought-after solutions related to associated gas, mainly by implementing at remote onshore locations or integrating on the deck of a floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel, where in its absence, the waste gas issue would remain unresolved and oilfields could remain undeveloped or production curtailed.
Under the recent agreement, Sumitomo Corporation will cooperate with the other three companies to promote the world's first c modular GTL commercial plant, seeking to win orders and expand sales by enabling oilfield development in regions such as Russia, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and South America.
Sumitomo Corporation is also working to develop other potential environmental projects on a global scale, including promoting technologies and systems designed to provide solutions to the issue of handling "produced water", another environmental concern related to oilfield development.
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