Pearl GTL - an overview

Construction at the Pearl GTL project, Qatar, 2010

The Pearl GTL plant has sold its first commercial shipment of GTL Gasoil, marking the start of production. At the peak of construction more than 52,000 people worked on Pearl GTL. Around 2 million tonnes of equipment and materials were imported to the site and workers installed enough steel and pipes to make 2.5 Eiffel Towers every month.

Pearl’s control room, the nerve centre of one of the largest and most sophisticated process control systems in the oil and gas industry, has powered up. The control room comprises of almost 1,000 control cabinets hosting 200 computer servers, programmed with 12 million lines of software code. The system is linked to every part of the plant by about 5,850 kilometres of control cables which laid end-to-end would stretch from Doha to London.

Pearl GTL is a large and complex project. Since the project launch in July 2006 progress has been good. The project is proceeding in line with our expectations at the time of final investment decision (FID).

Pearl GTL will add almost 8% to Shell’s production worldwide — making it the company’s main engine for growth for 2012. It is expected to ship its first product in 2011 and reach full production in 2012.

The proprietary Shell Middle Distillate Synthesis (SMDS) process will be at the heart of the two-train Pearl GTL plant. Developed over more than three decades, the process has been proven on a commercial scale at the 14,700-barrel-per-day Bintulu GTL plant in Malaysia, which began operation in 1993. Shell has over 3,500 patents at all stages of the GTL process. The Bintulu experience helped improve the chemical catalysts integral to the SMDS process. These improvements will reduce unit capital expenditure, allow faster processing and should enable Shell to produce greater volumes of fuel and other products at Pearl.

Building on its extensive experience marketing GTL products from Bintulu, Shell will export Pearl’s high value, differentiated premium products, including GTL gasoil, kerosene, naphtha, normal paraffin and base oils for lubricants, to markets around the globe.

Together with Qatargas 4, Pearl GTL represents a multi-billion dollar commitment to Qatar by Shell and the project is being developed in line with our sustainable development principles.

The project has been designed to use technology that will help to limit any environmental impact. The facility is designed to use every drop of water as part of our approach to not release any liquids from the plant. Pearl GTL’s industrial water processing plant will be the world’s largest, recovering, treating and re-using all the industrial process water. With a capacity to treat 280,000 barrels a day of water, Pearl GTL’s water treatment plant is comparable to that for a city of 140,000 people.