(83b) Economical Comparison of Compact Heat Exchange Reactors for a Small Fischer Tropsch Synthesis Plant

The need is growing for small scale Fischer Tropsch plants (1-500 bpd) to produce hydrocarbon products as fuel, fuel additives or synthetic oils and waxes.  Fischer Tropsch synthesis may be used for a wide choice of technologies and feedstocks: gas-to-liquid, coal-to-liquid, biomass to liquid and even waste-to-energy.  Conventional reactors, such as slurry bed and shell-and-tube, are utilized in large scale gas-to-liquid plants.  However, these reactors and many of the auxiliary equipment associated with them are not economically feasible to scale down to the 500 bpd plants.  Compact heat exchange reactors (CHER) have been proven as viable reactors for the small scale FT synthesis.  Based on the compact heat exchange technology, where small channel sizes and high exchanger metal density greatly increase the heat transfer, CHER can control the reaction tightly and increase the production rate per reactor volume.  CHERs are easily scalable by adding more process and coolant layers.  Furthermore, by incorporating the CHER in a modular design, plant capacity can be easily increased with the addition of more modules, allowing the plant to expand to 2,000 – 5,000 bpd.  An economic analysis for the small scale FT plant will be performed to compare the capital and operating costs of plants with different reactor types, as well as a study on the return of investment for each of the plants.