Question

1. What are the main differences between the production of oil, natural gas and coal?

2. Write a short description of Gas to refinery products (fuels) conversion technology using Natural gas, carbon dioxide and water?

Answer 1

1. Fundamentally Coal is found in solid state, oil is found in liquid and natural gas is found in vapor state.

Petroleum oill and natural gas hydrocaerbons are found in nature in the small or big pores of our mother nature earth's rock or in the oceans. These fuels are formed over millions of years due to the process of decaying of marine livings. These creatures die and are finally gathered on on the ocean bottomsOoil and natural gas are produced from wells driilled into the earth from lands or sea where appropriate platforms are made

Coal from deposits of animal and vegetables matter in the ground onlt at high pressure over miliions of years. In order to extratc coal, mining process is adopted universally

2. Steam reforming and water shift reactions are used to convert natural gas (basically methane), CO2 and water.

Following is the major chemical reaction in this process:

CH₄ + H₂O → CO + 3 H₂ (Steam reforming reaction with natural gas)

CO + H₂O → CO₂ + H₂ (Water shift reaction)

2 H₂ + CO → CH₃OH (Synthesis of methanol)

Methanol thus formed above can be coverted to fuel like gasoline using Mobil process.

In the mobile process, zeolite based catalyst ssytem is used to convert methanol to dimethyle ether which is then converted to paraffins, aromatics and naphthenes in the gasoline range material.

2 CH₃OH → CH₃OCH₃ + H₂O