UREP-11 Cycle

Project Description

With the State of Qatar positioning to become the world leader in natural gas production and processing, it is vital to develop cost effective and environmentally conscious technologies to convert the natural gas to ultra-clean fuels and value-added chemicals.  Furthermore, it is essential to understand and improve the characteristics of these synthetics fuels and hydrocarbon products to meet the energy market demands for future fuels and value-added chemicals. Diesel fuels obtained from natural gas via the Gas-to-Liquid (GTL) technology have already established their market value in USA, Europe and Japan as an environmentally attractive fuel, while other synthetic fuels from GTL are still waiting for their certification as transportation fuels. One of these fuel cuts are the Synthetic Paraffin Kerosene (SPK) fuels that can be utilized for the aviation industry to replace conventional kerosene (Jet A and Jet A-1). These SPK fuels have certain desirable properties, such as lower emissions and higher energy content per volume; however, they are challenged in important properties such as density due in part to their lack of aromatic compounds which boost these properties in conventional jet fuels. Using SPK fuels for aviation use is of interest to Qatar Airways who have envisioned becoming the world leading airline in alternative and clean fuels.  They has already flown the first commercial flights on synthetic GTL jet fuels using a 50/50 blend of SPK and Jet A-1, with the stated desire of increasing the SPK components of the blend beyond this proportion.

This project aims to, through experimental and simulation work, develop relationships between the properties of SPK fuels and their compositions. The properties of interest are the ones that are crucial for fuel certification, which are the density, flash point, freezing point, heat content and viscosity. Using base components, a multitude of blends will be formulated to provide as broad a spread of compositions as possible. For this project it is planned to use pure normal– iso– and cyclo– paraffins as the base components because they formulate a typical SPK for jet fuels production. Upon formulation of the blends, they will be tested for their properties following rigorous industrial standards for safety, reliability and accuracy. On completion of the testing regime the physical properties will be correlated against the composition and various statistical analysis work, such as using neural networks, will be carried out to determine relationships between the two. The statistical work will allow for a better understanding of how the properties are influenced by each base compound. This will allow for the development of a suitable strategy for the upgrading of the properties of SPK fuel to match those of Jet A-1 more closely, ultimately allowing SPK to be used in the aviation industry.