Rosneft orders GTL facility for Siberian plant

GTL facility will be completed by 2014

Russian oil giant Rosneft is planning to use a natural gas-to-liquids (GTL) plant which will begin operations in 2014.

The company selected Oxford Catalysts Group Plc (OCG)’s technology for a natural GTL plant to be located at its Angarsk refinery in the Irkutsk region of Siberia.

It will process 10 million cubic meters of gas a year into about 100 barrels a day of synthetic crude, Oxford Catalysts said.

Rosneft may build additional gas-to-liquids, or GTL, plants to process the gas it produces alongside oil into either synthetic crude or products, including diesel, rather than burning it off, the Oxford, England-based company said.

The Russian government wants oil producers to use 95 per cent of the gas extracted alongside oil, which is currently burned off due to a lack of pipelines.

Russian oil and gas deposits in remote East Siberia only gained a pipeline, the East Siberian Pacific Ocean pipeline, or ESPO, which is still under construction, for crude transit in 2008. The region still lacks gas transit infrastructure of scale, making gas-to-liquids a viable alternative.