ethane

And we found that methane can be produced from ethane," he added.

The extraction plant will have the capacity to process as much as 1.2 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day and will produce approximately 40,000 barrels per day of ethane. The extraction plant will be located on land owned by ASC in Fort Saskatchewan, adjacent to the site of ASC's Heartland Offgas Plant.

"What we would really like is, from hexane, to get only ethane and decane;' says Brookhart.

The export terminal, which is on schedule to commence operations in the third quarter, will have the capability to load fully refrigerated ethane at rates up to 10,000 bbls per hour.

NGL-4, on stream in late 2002, has this capacity: 1.1m t/y of ethane; 1m t/y of propane; 700,000 t/y of butane; and 400,000 t/y of NGL.

Enterprise Products Partners LP (NYSE:EPD), a partnership that provides midstream energy services, on Wednesday announced that it has proposed the building of a fully refrigerated ethane export facility on the Texas Gulf Coast.

Naimi says Saudi Arabia is in the process of approving a "major budget item" to develop ethane stripped from associated gas produced at the 750,000 barrel per day Shaybah oil field.

This is being done for the (ethane) gas allocation," SABIC's chief financial officer Mutlaq Al Morished said.

But when the probe landed, it recorded only tiny amounts of ethane. This indicates that "the early photochemicals models suggesting that ethane was the end point in the atmospheric photochemistry were wrong," says Owen.

UTOPIA would transport previously refined or fractionated NGLs, including ethane and propane, with an initial 50,000 bpd of capacity, which is expandable to over 75,000 bpd.

Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia offer ethane supplies at prices as low as $0.75 a million British thermal units (mmBtu), compared with a minimum cost of $3.20 a mmBtus in Europe and the US.