Siluria Technologies (San Francisco, Calif.; www.siluria.com) held a grand opening event announcing the successful startup of its demonstration plant located in La Porte, Texas. The plant is wholly owned by Siluria, and co-located at a plant operated by Braskem America, Inc. This milestone marks the world’s first large-scale production of ethylene directly from natural gas through oxidative coupling of methane (OCM). The demonstration plant is the final scaleup of the OCM process technology and paves the way for Siluria to deploy commercial-scale plants in the 2017-2018 timeframe.
Siluria’s OCM technology is the first commercially viable process to directly convert natural gas to ethylene, a key building block for the global petrochemicals industry and a new basis from which to produce transportation fuels. The company’s breakthrough innovations enable natural gas to supplement petroleum as the worldwide basis for commodity fuels, chemicals and plastics.
“Today marks the culmination of years of effort by our remarkable scientific and engineering teams. This revolutionary breakthrough has the potential to shift the foundation of the hydrocarbon economy by using abundant natural gas, to produce high-value chemicals and fuels,” said Ed Dineen, Siluria’s CEO. “We are well positioned with our commercial and engineering partners to now move quickly to full commercialization of our proprietary technologies.”