SARrugby.com

This is the way for the US to go:

http://www.chem.info/Articles/2013/02/Material-Handling-Sasol-s-Gas-to-Liquids-Ethane-Cracker-Complex/

This will contribute towards energy independance and help to reduce unemployment.

Administrator. My apologies for posting this non-rugby related stuff. Feel free to remove this after a day or 2, but the category says General stuff, so I thought it should be OK to have it here.

 Hi Blikkies, nice to hear from you. I'll check this out. 

 Sounds impressive. The natural gas abundance coming from fracking has really crushed gas prices and sadly a few stocks I own like Devon industries. But the offset is la low cost energy boost for industries like the paper industry.. Blikkies is this mostly LNG or also significant amounts of value added products from the ethane cracker?

Nice to see RSA leading the world in this aspect of energy.

"But the offset is la low cost energy boost for industries like the paper industry.. Blikkies is this mostly LNG or also significant amounts of value added products from the ethane cracker?"

The GTL (gas-to-liquid) process produces gasoline, diesel and kerosene (jet fuel) from LNG. A small percentage (depends on the operating process conditions, but usually it is less than 10%) of heavy ends is also formed and it is these heavies that are sent to the cracker to convert it into ethylene, which is a feedstock in the production of high value polymers. The beauty of all the GTL products is that none of them contains any sulfur- or nitrogen compounds which makes them much more environmentally acceptable.

I see you refer to the paper industry, but I am of the opinion that this is a dying industry and that a largely paperless world will be a reality within a decade.

Blikkies thanks for that, and for alerting me to this development. On the paper front there are many products, some of which are substituted by the Internet. But others like tissue products, paper cups, cereal boxes etc are not particularly effected. ...so less paper sure, but not paperless. There are actually a very broad array of products that come from pulp.

Blikkies, it's always nice to hear from old friends.  We have a nice dialogue on this site, with plenty of overseas posters, we would love to have you pitch in as a Cheetahs specialist.