“It also speaks to enabling parts of the world to become less dependent on oil than they are today,” he said.

The United States, of course, is awash in cheap methane from the natural gas fracking boom. Producing fuels from gas is nothing new. The Fischer-Tropsch method, developed in Germany in the 1920s, has been used to do just that. But it’s an expensive and energy intensive process because methane has to be first broken down into carbon monoxide and hydrogen and then that resulting synthetic gas has to be transformed into hydrocarbons that can be refined into fuel.

Using technology developed by MIT professor and Siluria director Angela Belcher, the company’s oxidative coupling of methane process directly converts methane into ethylene through the use of a catalyst that doesn’t consume energy. Ethylene, a key component of many petrochemicals, is itself a $150 billion annual business. The ethylene then can be converted to gasoline, diesel or jet fuel through Siluria’s process.

Siluria chief executive Edward Dineen estimates that at commercial scale the company’s technology can produce gasoline for about $15 a barrel, not counting the cost of natural gas. “As long oil is eight times more expensive than gas, we’ll have an advantage,” he says.

Investors apparently believe so. Such blue-chip venture firms as Kleiner Perks Caufield & Byers and Vulcan Capital have poured more than $80 million into Siluria and the company is building a demonstration plant in Texas with petrochemical giant Brascom.

Julia Allen, an analyst with market research firm Lux Research, noted that Siluria is one of many companies trying to exploit supplies of cheap natural gas to make products but that its technology appears to be unique.

“Interesting technology will only get you so far, though,” she told me. “At the end of the day you have to make your cost numbers.”

Dineen, a former chief executive of biofuels company LS9, says Siluria will soon announce a partnership with a major petrochemicals-related company he declined to identify.

“They’ll be integrating their technology with ours and licensing that to the world,” he says. “It’s another validation to the outside world that this stuff is real.”

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