Qatar Daily News

Royal Dutch Shell PLC’s two mammoth natural-gas projects in Qatar will increase the company’s cash flow by $4 billion a year when they start up in 2011 and give a big boost to the company’s output, said Peter Voser, Shell’s chief executive.

Speaking to reporters in London, Mr. Voser said the Pearl gas-to-liquids plant and Qatargas 4, a liquefied-natural-gas development, would deliver 350,000 barrels a day of oil—some 10% of Shell’s current output.

“These projects combined will have a substantial impact on Shell’s world-wide production [and] generate sustained positive cash flows for decades to come,” he said. Income from the Qatar ventures will underpin Shell’s next wave of new investments, he said.

Mr. Voser was speaking after Shell took analysts round Pearl and Qatargas 4, two projects that are vital to the company’s growth strategy. With a price tag of $18 billion to $19 billion, Pearl—which will convert Qatari natural gas into diesel and other high-value oil products—is the biggest single project in the global oil industry and is also the world’s largest GTL development.
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Qatar, the world’s biggest exporter of liquefied natural gas, and Royal Dutch Shell Plc, will probably delay the start of their Qatargas 4 LNG project by at least a year until 2011, an official working on the project said.

“Qatargas 4 won’t be ready before 2011 or 2012,” Nawid Kashani-Shirazi, senior process manager of gas treatment at BASF SE, which is handling process technology licensing for parts of the plant, said in an interview in Abu Dhabi yesterday.

Qatar is building a series of gas export facilities, the biggest of their kind, that are all suffering delays as the nation considers the demands on its gas fields and the cost of building complex projects simultaneously.

“Qatargas 2 has been in commissioning phase for the past two months, and the first drop of LNG is expected this month, and Qatargas 3 is planned to start sometime in the first half of next year,” Kashani-Shirazi said, while attending The Energy Exchange’s Gas Arabia conference.
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Royal Dutch Shell is making a huge — and risky — bet on technology that transforms natural gas to diesel fuel

In the search for alternatives to gasoline, Royal Dutch Shell PLC has made one of the biggest and boldest bets in the energy industry.

The Anglo-Dutch company is investing up to $18 billion in a vast plant in Qatar to transform natural gas into clean-burning synthetic diesel fuel. Due to come on line in late 2010, it is one of the world’s most ambitious industrial projects and Shell’s largest single investment.

But the development, known as Pearl GTL, involves huge risks. It’s based on a technology known as gas to liquids, or GTL, that is untested on such a massive scale. And with construction costs higher than they were when the project was announced in 2002, some Shell investors fear that Pearl could suffer the same extended delays and budget blowouts that have plagued other multibillion-dollar energy projects around the world in recent years.

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