Outgoing Sasol chief executive Pieter Cox said the company and its gas-to-liquids (GTL) partner ChevronTexaco were talking to Canberra about establishing a plant in Australia.

Cox said it would only be a matter of time before the partners’ subsidiary company, Sasol Chevron, reached an agreement with Australian authorities.

Speaking from Perth, locally-based Sasol Chevron representative Tony Pytte said the company had been quietly working away in Australia for several years.

“We’ve been examining the opportunities here for a few years,” he said.

“The federal and state governments have been very supportive, so the issues are commercial. It’s a matter of making a good deal with the right gas suppliers. We are talking to suppliers now, but the discussions are confidential.”

But GTL projects were massive and it could still be several years before a project was up and running, he said.

GTL provides a clean-burning, low emission diesel fuel. Diesel offers lower greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline but conventional diesel has high sulphur and particulate emissions.

However, GTL overcomes these problems, and with diesel technology continually improving and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions becoming more urgent, GTL has a bright future, according to Pytte.

Sasol is looking to build three or four gas-to-liquids plants globally, with partners, to reach 600,000 barrels a day in 10 years, he said.

It is already completing the construction of its first gas-to- liquids plant outside South Africa, in Qatar, at an initial cost of $900m, and when this plant came onstream later this year interest in the fuel would grow, according to Pytte.

South Africa and Qatar have long-standing links in gas-to-liquids research.

During the apartheid era South Africa was subject to oil embargoes and it started developing coal-to-liquids plants as an alternative. It eventually determined that it was more cost-effective to use natural gas, not coal, as the main ingredient.

After the collapse of apartheid, the former state oil company, now privatised and renamed Sasol Ltd, was still interested in the potential of this technology and went to Qatar seeking a large supply of natural gas.

In July 2001, Sasol and Qatar officials signed an agreement to jointly build the first commercial-scale GTL plant.

Now Sasol also expects to soon award the first major contract to begin construction at its second planned gas-to-liquids project in Nigeria in the next two months.