Techno-economic and environmental assessment of Gasoline produced from GTL and MTG processes

Abstract Natural gas is expected to grow faster than oil or coal with predictions that it will be the leading primary fuel between 2020 and 2030. Technically, there are a number of ways to monetize the natural gas resource depending for example on the resource location, quantity, and quality. Beside the conventional way of transferring natural gas through pipelines, other options considered promising include: liquefied natural gas (LNG), compressed natural gas (CNG), gas to solid (GTS), gas to wire (GTW), gas to liquids (GTL) and gas to commodity (GtC). The utilization ways vary as being physical compression and mixing process like the case of LNG, CNG, and GTS or chemical conversion process like the case of GTL. Some of these utilization options are described as mature, while others are developing or prospective options that need more investment. In this study, the gas to methanol option is explored considering the methanol to gasoline (MTG) production route and compared to GTL process and products. The objective of this work is to conduct rigorous simulation models for two NG utilization routes namely, GTL and MTG in order to help the decision-maker in gas processing industry. Given a natural gas feedstock, it is desired to assess economically and environmentally the two production routes of gasoline product. In addition, the study aims to investigate the comparative and sensitivity analyses to incorporate the sustainability perspectives between GTL and MTG production routes. The results indicate a higher overall yield for the MTG process with a net economic value of around $568 per tonne of gasoline produced and 0.2 tonne of CO2-e emitted per tonne of product. Furthermore, increasing the percentage of methanol being processed to gasoline indicates to have more net economic profitability but with increased amounts of CO2 emissions. These results indicate the significance of MTG process and can be further studied to identify the optimal percentage of methanol being processed to gasoline as a trade-off between economic and environmental benefits.