
Siluria Technologies, Inc. was a
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
-based research company founded in 2007. It attempted to develop a commercial method to convert
natural gas
Natural gas (also called fossil gas or simply gas) is a naturally occurring mixture of gaseous hydrocarbons consisting primarily of methane in addition to various smaller amounts of other higher alkanes. Low levels of trace gases like carbon ...
into
ethylene
Ethylene ( IUPAC name: ethene) is a hydrocarbon which has the formula or . It is a colourless, flammable gas with a faint "sweet and musky" odour when pure. It is the simplest alkene (a hydrocarbon with carbon-carbon double bonds).
Ethylene ...
, gasoline or
diesel fuel
Diesel fuel , also called diesel oil, is any liquid fuel specifically designed for use in a diesel engine, a type of internal combustion engine in which fuel ignition takes place without a spark as a result of compression of the inlet air and ...
using chemical catalysts. The company received over $100m from four rounds of start-up funding from venture capital firms and
Saudi Aramco
Saudi Aramco ( ar, أرامكو السعودية '), officially the Saudi Arabian Oil Company (formerly Arabian-American Oil Company) or simply Aramco, is a Saudi Arabian public petroleum and natural gas company based in Dhahran. , it is one of ...
. A test run of the system produced gasoline in
Hayward, California in August 2014.
McDermott, an engineering firm, purchased Siluria in 2019. McDermott emerged from bankruptcy and spun off its Lummus division including Siluria’s intellectual property and a demonstration plant in La Porte, Texas in 2020.
References
Synthetic fuel companies
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