Synthetic or reformulated fuels ; a challenge for catalysis

Abstract Despite comparative figures for wordwide crude oil and natural gas proven reserves, present time contribution of syngas chemistry to motorfuels remains marginal when the refining industry is faced to main constraints: market demand evolution, stringent specifications and environmental issues. Actually natural gas upgrading via syngas chemistry yields key products (e.g. methanol) among which clean motorfuels (ethers, F.T. products) should develop despite the huge investments required, mostly for syngas production. Main challenges and corresponding issues for catalysts and related technologies are identified for Fischer-Tropsch synthesis and motorfuels long-term reformulation. Among other, mastering the chain-growth (F.T. synthesis) improving the FCC products: gasoline, and LCO for diesel pool. All these issues need significant progresses in catalyst and technology to be solved. Lastly, our economical study, focused on diesel-fuel production, shows up that clean diesel (from S.R.-LCO mixtures) and F.T. diesel reach similar production costs when cheap N.G. is available. In the future F.T. middle distillates should amount to a few percent (5-100 MMT) of the 2000-2300 MMT of transport fuels expected from oil refining. However they should more and more be a compulsory part of diesel pool if the level of investment for an F.T. process continues to decrease significantly.