Office of Fossil Energy

• Main Author: E. P. Robertson
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1999
• Subjects: Alaska North Slope; north slope; Prudhoe Bay; Alaska
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.618.6267; http://www.fischer-tropsch.org/DOE/DOE_reports/99_01023/ext99_01023.pdf

Contract DE-AC07-99ID13727 iii The Alaska North Slope (ANS) holds a vast resource of natural gas but has no current method of transportation from the North Slope to world markets. The Prudhoe Bay field contains the largest portion of the discovered natural gas on the North Slope or about 21.8 Tcf of natural gas available for sale after CO2 removal and satisfying power requirements and other North Slope use. The natural gas at Prudhoe Bay that is produced during oil production operations is reinjected and used to increase oil recovery. Cur-rently, there are two broad gas-marketing schemes proposed for commercializing the natural gas on the North Slope. One is a gas-pipeline/liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant scenario; the other is a gas-to-liquids (GTL) option that chemically converts the natural gas to a stable, liquid syn-crude in a North Slope plant, eliminating the need for an additional pipeline from the North Slope to a southern Alaska port. The purposes of this report were to assess the effect of applying new technology to the economics of a proposed GTL plant, to evaluate the potential of a slower-paced, staged deployment of GTL technol-