Shell anticipates that its Pearl gas-to-liquids (GTL) plant at Ras Laffan in Qatar may be offline into the second quarter of 2017 as it works to fix a problem with “some or all” of the plant’s 18 gasifiers. The problem came to light in late December, when the Anglo-Dutch major announced that it was producing at 50% of full 140,000 b/d capacity. Since then the plant has been totally closed down.
Shell’s chief financial officer Simon Henry told a 2 February analysts conference call that the Pearl GTL outage “is an operational factor in the first quarter, maybe second quarter. We’re just effectively taking the plant down at the moment. It could take a couple of months to bring it back. We don’t know yet quite how long it would take.” (CONTINUED - 622 WORDS)
