{"id":3862,"date":"2010-12-23T14:50:18","date_gmt":"2010-12-23T14:50:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=3862"},"modified":"2010-12-23T14:50:18","modified_gmt":"2010-12-23T14:50:18","slug":"new_interest_in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=3862","title":{"rendered":"New Interest in Turning Gas to Diesel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/12\/24\/business\/energy-environment\/24fuel.html?_r=1&#038;hp\">Matthew Wald:<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>Diesel and jet fuel are usually made from crude oil. But with oil prices rising even as a glut of natural gas keeps prices for that fuel extraordinarily cheap, a bit of expensive alchemy is suddenly starting to look financially appealing: turning natural gas into liquid fuels.<br \/>\nA South African firm, Sasol, announced Monday that it would spend just over 1 billion Canadian dollars to buy a half-interest in a Canadian shale gas field, so it can explore turning natural gas into diesel and other liquids. Sasol&#8217;s proprietary conversion technology was developed decades ago to help the apartheid government of South Africa survive an international oil embargo, and it is a refinement of the ones used by the Germans to make fuel for the Wehrmacht during World War II.<br \/>\nThe technology takes &#8220;a lot of money and a lot of effort,&#8221; said Michael E. Webber, associate director of the Center for International Energy Environmental Policy at the University of Texas, Austin. &#8220;You wouldn&#8217;t do this if you could find easy oil,&#8221; he said.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/12\/24\/business\/energy-environment\/24fuel.html?_r=1&#038;hp\">Matthew Wald:<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>Diesel and jet fuel are usually made from crude oil. But with oil prices rising even as a glut of natural gas keeps prices for that fuel extraordinarily cheap, a bit of expensive alchemy is suddenly starting to look financially appealing: turning natural gas into liquid fuels.<br \/>\nA South African firm, Sasol, announced Monday that it would spend just over 1 billion Canadian dollars to buy a half-interest in a Canadian shale gas field, so it can explore turning natural gas into diesel and other liquids. Sasol&#8217;s proprietary conversion technology was developed decades ago to help the apartheid government of South Africa survive an international oil embargo, and it is a refinement of the ones used by the Germans to make fuel for the Wehrmacht during World War II.<br \/>\nThe technology takes &#8220;a lot of money and a lot of effort,&#8221; said Michael E. Webber, associate director of the Center for International Energy Environmental Policy at the University of Texas, Austin. &#8220;You wouldn&#8217;t do this if you could find easy oil,&#8221; he said.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,29,32,35,11,22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3862"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3862\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}