Update On World's Largest Gas-To-Liquid (GTL) Plant In The World -- July 30, 2014

Rigzone is reporting:

In 2008, Shell announced it would partner with Qatar Petroleum and build Pearl GTL in order to produce cleaner-burning diesel and kerosene, base oils for top-tier lubricants, a chemical feedstock called naphtha (used to make plastics) and normal paraffin, which is used to produce detergents.

Today, the plant in Ras Laffan Industrial City, 80km north of Doha, Qatar, is the largest gas-to-liquids plant in the world.

At the peak of construction 52,000 workers from 65 countries were deployed on the site and overall it took the team 500 million man-hours to design and build.

As well as being the biggest, Pearl GTL is also one of the most complex and challenging energy projects in the world – the GTL technology alone has 3,500 patents.

The statistics are staggering: to build Pearl GTL a total of 750,000 cubic metres of concrete was poured. That’s enough to construct two Burj Khalifas (the world’s tallest building).

Pearl GTL draws on gas from Qatar’s North Field, estimated to hold 900 trillion cubic feet of gas. That’s an estimated 13% of the world’s total.