Biography

XTL & DME Institute

Biography - Dr. Ronald Sills

Dr. Ronald (Ron) Sills, Co-Founding Director, XTL & DME Institute, is an internationally recognized expert and speaker on a broad range of energy and alternative fuels topics. He has been a featured speaker at conferences in Paris, London, Brisbane, Stockholm and Rome as well as numerous locations in the USA.

Ron’s workshops, presentations and articles have focused on renewable feedstocks/natural gas-to-market developments including Gas-to-Liquids (GTL) processes via methanol route, particularly Dimethyl Ether (DME/rDME) and Methanol-to-Gasoline (MTG). He recently authored a major white paper for the World LPG Association "Renewable DME (rDME) Pathways in the LPG Industry".

His recent experience includes being a (a) consultant in conversion technologies and analyses of the natural gas/biomass to products value chain for several major energy companies, and (b) former board member for a start-up company making carbon negative fuels from non-edible biomass. From 2013 to present, he assisted the U.S. DOE ARPA-E program. He was the peer reviewer for the GTL section of IEA 2010 World Energy Outlook, and Elsevier articles. Before his retirement from BP in 2009, he was Gas Conversion Network Leader and Engineering Manager in the Conversion Technology Centre. He led the Knowledge Management initiative for BP’s 300 bpd GTL-FT demonstration plant in Alaska. Prior to joining BP/Amoco in the 1990s, he was manager of Mobil’s Research Planning and Evaluation Group at the Paulsboro New Jersey Research Laboratory, where he was responsible for evaluating Mobil’s fuels/lubricants and refinery process/synthetic fuels R&D. Also, at Mobil, he was a member of the team for the development and commercialization of the fixed-bed MTG process.

He co-authored a National Research Council report entitled Fuels to Drive Our Future in 1991. Dr. Sills is also an honorary member of the International DME Association (IDA). He has been involved in the IDA from its inception in 2001, and served as a founding representative from BP. Dr. Sills holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Chemical Engineering from MIT and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Columbia University. He is the co-inventor for more than 10 patents.