Bring more oil to market, or find another fuel to put in the gas tank, and you lower oil prices.

A privately owned Dallas company called Synfuels International says it can do both by using a chemical engineering method developed at Texas A&M that turns natural gas into gasoline.

"If you take the 4 quadrillion cubic feet of natural gas that is considered stranded or that's flared, and convert that into a liquid fuel, it will far surpass the oil in place today," said Ben Weber Jr., chairman and CEO of Synfuels International. "And it would be a more clean- burning fuel."

Gas is usually found in the same rocks as oil. This associated gas makes it easier to get the oil out of the ground because its pressure forces oil up the well. The oil can go into a storage tank, a truck, a ship or a pipeline. But it's not that easy to deal with the gas.

Where there's a gas-gathering network of pipelines leading to a market, gas is a valuable product worth collecting along with the oil. Without a pipeline network or a market, the gas is considered stranded and has little value.

Stranded gas can limit oil production. Exxon Mobil Corp.'s new Sakhalin oil field is already declining because of a debate with the government of Russia that's blocking the sale of the gas to China.

The solution many oil producers choose is to burn the gas. The World Bank estimates 14 billion cubic feet a day of oilfield gas is flared in countries such as Russia and Nigeria. That flared gas adds 400 million tons a year of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Turning gas into a liquid would make it a valuable commodity. The usual way of doing this, however, is an expensive chilling process to take natural gas more than 260 degrees below zero. Every step involved in transporting this liquefied natural gas product involves super-chilling.

Natural gas can also be chemically transformed into a liquid that doesn't require super-chilling. One method, the Fischer-Tropsch process, was developed in Germany in the 1920s and can be used to turn either natural gas or coal into oil.

But the process was so expensive that its only large- scale use was by countries that did not otherwise have access to oil – Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa.

Now, oil prices are so high that companies like Royal Dutch-Shell and China's Shenhua Coal are building plants using the Fischer- Tropsch process.

Shell hopes to start gas-to-liquids production at its $18 billion plant in Qatar in 2010. Exxon Mobil shelved a similar project in Qatar earlier this year as estimates of the cost approached $21 billion.

Synfuels uses a different process to convert gas to liquids. Mr. Weber says it is cheaper than Fischer-Tropsch and makes sense even with small projects. The process runs natural gas through a very high-temperature chamber for a moment to convert it into acetylene, then quenches the heat as it turns the acetylene into 95-octane gasoline.

The process produces roughly one barrel of gasoline for every 10,000 cubic feet of natural gas. It's not economic for gas close to a market where it's worth $11.53 per thousand cubic feet. But it does make sense for gas in remote oil fields, where the gas liquids can be mixed with oil and shipped in the same pipeline.

Synfuels has spent 10 years and $50 million – twice as long and five times as much money as initially estimated – to bring this process to market. To help finance development, Synfuels sold a 15 percent stake in the company last November to the Kuwaiti firm Aref Energy Holding Co. for $28.5 million.

Synfuels has a pilot plant in Bryan, Texas, busy converting gas to gasoline.

Mr. Weber said negotiations are under way with four groups of companies that would like to use Synfuels' process in the Middle East and the former Soviet Union. He hopes to sign contracts within 30 days.

"If enough of these plants come into service, it could put a substantial dent in oil prices," Mr. Weber said.