NYTimes: Shell Places a Not-So-Green Bet on Natural Gas

Outside Royal Dutch Shell’s research laboratories here, a stack of tubes, tanks and dials four stories high percolates 24 hours a day. This bewildering-looking apparatus is a tiny prototype of one of Shell’s crown jewels: the huge Pearl gas-to-liquids plant in Qatar.

Now gradually increasing production, Pearl sucks in huge volumes of natural gas from the gargantuan North Field under the aquamarine Gulf and — in a feat of seeming alchemy — transforms the gas into jet fuel and diesel and other liquids far more valuable than natural gas these days. Eventually, Pearl could earn Shell $10 billion per year, justifying its nearly $20 billion cost.

The Shell lab’s director, HP Calis, presents a sample from Pearl for a visitor to sniff. Because it is made from purified gas, the clear fluid in his flask does not have the nauseating odor of gasoline and other products of oil refineries. To Mr. Calis’s evident pleasure, it is as sweet-smelling as beeswax, indicating it will burn cleaner than its conventional cousins. Shell lore has it that one can even drink the stuff, though Mr. Calis said he would not recommend it.  MORE