Pearl GTL set for big payback

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Damon Evans

 11 March 2008 05:35 GMT

The $18 billion Shell-led Pearl gas-to-liquids plant in Qatar is set to reap the rewards of the current high oil price climate and is likely to have a payback period of as little as four years thanks to burgeoning GTL economics.

The Pearl plant will be the largest GTL plant in the world when it starts up around the end of the decade and will produce around 3 billion barrels of oil equivalent over the life of the project, said Shell’s managing director of Pearl GTL, Andy Brown, at the Gastech conference today.

Spiralling costs have taken the project’s price tag to between $12 billion and $18 billion from an original budget of $5 billion according to Shell, but some industry observers claim the outfit will be lucky to get change from $20…

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