OxfordCatalysts' Microchannel Technology Wins 2011 Chemical Engineering Award

Microchannel technology developed by the Oxford Catalysts Group was named as the winner of the Kirkpatrick Chemical Engineering Achievement Award at the ChemInnovations conference and exhibition in Houston, Texas on 12 Sept.


The UK group’s modular synthetic fuel technology - which enables the small scale and economic production of synthetic fuels via gas-to-liquids (GTL), biomass-to-liquids (BTL) and coal-to-liquids (CTL) via the Fischer-Tropsch (FT) reaction - includes microchannel FT combined with a new highly active FT catalyst and steam methane reforming (SMR) reactors.

_The Engineer
The Velocys / Oxford Catalyst microchannel technology for scalable GTL, BTL, and CTL, has won previous engineering awards, and is likely to win more in the future. By bringing Fischer-Tropsch technology down to a size and cost which can be implemented for offshore and stranded GTL, the microchannel devices are likely to have a slowly building evolutionary impact on liquid fuels production from an unexpected source.

The fact that the devices can also convert biomass and coal to liquid fuels is an added advantage, which will eventually bring the cost of F-T plants down from the $billion range into the $ hundreds of thousands range.

It is designed for use in the smallscale distributed production of biofuels, and as practical way to transform associated and stranded gas via GTL into high quality synthetic crude. This opens up the possibility of carrying out GTL offshore.

According to Oxford Catalysts, the technology could also make it possible to use the GTL process to convert North America’s abundant shale gas resources into diesel and jet fuels.

The Kirkpatrick Chemical Engineering Achievement Award recognises noteworthy chemical-engineering technology commercialised anywhere in the world during the two years prior to a given award year.

Jeff McDaniel, commercial director at the Oxford Catalysts Group said the award recognised “the environmental and commercial significance of our activities in GTL and BTL. _The Engineer