According to some media accounts your technology will help to create "greener building blocks" and use of natural gas will certainly help to reduce the need for crude oil which is traditionally used as a feedstock for these materials though one might ask whether the primary advantage is one of cost and lower reliance on these products or it is truly a greener technology. How does your technology compare to use of crude oil as a feedstock in efficiency, cost and carbon and other byproducts?

The principal driver of our work is superior economics. The technology for direct coupling of methane to ethylene ("OCM") will allow us and our partners to take advantage of the gas/oil price parity discount, historically in the 60-70% range in markets with access to both feedstocks. Over the long term, the economic benefits of a global feedstock switch from oil to natural gas can be as profound as the consequences of the feedstock switch from wood to coal in the 19th century, and from coal to oil in the 20th century.

Our technology will also have significant environmental benefits for the following reasons:

• The incumbent technology, steam cracking, is highly endothermic. While highly optimized over the last 70 years, steam cracking requires a lot of energy and produces 1.5-2 lb CO2 per pound of product, for a total of ~200 million tons of CO2 per year globally. Most of this CO2 is the result of burning fuel (natural gas) to heat the cracking furnace
• In contrast, our technology is exothermic. It produces energy rather than requiring it, and this energy can be used elsewhere in the plant, thus reducing the overall energy budget.
• In addition to the above, our process uses natural gas instead of oil, and the overall environmental footprint of natural gas production is lower than that of oil.
• Other likely process differences in favor of Siluria's approach include reduction in emissions of nitric oxide, heavy metals and sulfur.

Many or most alternative energy technologies are reliant on incentives and subsidies, which are used to finance start-up costs and experimentation with the promise of cost competitive products only to be realized once capacity reaches a scale that will allow larger-scale commercial production. Is that also the case with your technology? Are you utilizing incentives and subsidies to get started? At one point does your technology become commercially competitive with traditional production processes?

Our work is driven by the significant and sustainable price advantage of natural gas over oil as a more abundant, widely distributed feedstock. Today this has limited utility due to a lack of technologies for converting it to higher value products such as commodity chemicals and fuels. We do not rely on government subsidies.

http://www.safehaven.com/article/19706/conserving-resources-through...