Emir of Qatar inaugurates Pearl GTL Project
Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani today officially inaugurated the Pearl Gas-to-Liquids (GTL) Project, the largest GTL plant in the world and the largest energy project in the state of Qatar.
Visiting dignitaries toured the facility and were briefed on the state-of-the-art technologies used to convert natural gas from Qatar's North Field into high-quality liquid fuels and products that will be sold around the world.
Pearl GTL was jointly developed by Qatar Petroleum and Shell, creating an additional route for Qatar to generate value from its enormous supply of gas. Using innovative technology and engineering, Pearl GTL turns natural gas into high-quality liquid fuels and products, thereby realizing the full upside of accessing the oil markets.
Pearl GTL is a fully integrated upstream/downstream, world-scale project located in Ras Laffan Industrial City, 80 km north of Doha. It captures the full value chain from offshore development through onshore gas processing to refining of finished products and the distribution of these products across the world.
When fully operational, Pearl GTL will have the capacity to produce 140,000 barrels per day of high-quality GTL products (gasoil, naphtha, kerosene, paraffin and lubricant base oils), thereby helping meet increasing global demand for high-quality hydrocarbons.
It will also produce 120,000 barrels a day of natural gas liquids (NGLs) and ethane.
The project is being developed in two trains; major construction was completed at the end of 2010. The first train started up in Q1 2011, and the first commercial shipment of gasoil was exported in June 2011.
The second train started up in November 2011, bringing in sour gas from offshore wells. The gas processing plant has come online quickly, delivering on-specification gas, condensate, LPG and sulfur.
At peak, 52,000 construction workers from 60 countries were involved in the construction of Pearl GTL, a project which took 500 million hours to design and build. The project broke many industry records in terms of safety, achieving 77 million hours without a lost-time injury in 2010.
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