Thank you.
How do you pioneer something
that was developed and used (extensively) >60 years prior? What Shell did was twofold:
1. Invest in developing and refining FT processes that would yield specific desirable and marketable products (this was done decades before they built Pearl)
2. invest in a facility large enough to produce these things at a scale that made them economically viable. The caveat of course was that due to the huge capital investment in the facility, they couldn't really horde the product, which is why competitors are able to purchase and cost-effectively utilize these items in their own products.
As I said, Mobil was going down the same path (I've posted about it years ago on the forum, it's hard to find data on it now), and had invested billions in their own FT plant that would produce base oils, but the cost got so high that they eventually just cut their losses and walked away.
But it wasn't a chemistry concept, it's a well understood process (Fischer-Tropsch) with a history of successful utilization (see link above). But only two companies were willing to invest not only in the IP, over many years, but also the billions in capital necessary to construct a facility large enough to make these products economically competitive with conventional offerings, offerings that don't require the same scale of investment.
However, one of those companies (Mobil) eventually cut their losses, while Shell, similar to Southern Company in Georgia with Vogtle, decided to keep pouring the money on to get it to a state of completion, and that's how we ended up with the Pearl facility.
Also of note, Pearl isn't Shell's first GTL plant. They have one in Malaysia that came online in 1993, but to give you an idea of scale, according to Shell, this facility produces 14,700 barrels per day of liquid and solid hydrocarbons. Pearl produces 260,000 barrels per day. Shell spent something like 20 years refining their FT process (and have a huge list of patents to show for it) in the lead-up to the commissioning of the Bintulu facility in Malaysia, and it wasn't until over a decade later that they invested further in the technology, and scale necessary, at Pearl, for their GTL offerings to become significant, and this is when the rest of us started to hear about it as if it was new and exciting
Saying Shell "pioneered" GTL is a lot like saying Tesla "pioneered" the EV, a technology that goes back over a century and had various kicks at commercialization during that period, long before Tesla as a company existed, including more recently GM's EV1. Though GTL commercialization (see link) had significantly more in the way of, and scale of, successes relative to EV commercialization over that period, primarily due to recent advances in battery chemistry, with which there is no parallel in the FT space.
From reading lots of the conversations about these light weight oils many of us lost our minds about at first I have come to a conclusion. I do not think the thin oils are really as bad as we want to believe. I was thinking about it and looking at my 2009 Accord.
