Resumen del autor, extraído del texto. Natural gas reserves have increased over the past 20 years their share in primary energy consumption all over the world. Natural gas transportation, however, is a high cost technology hindering full accessibility to world gas reserves: both LNG (liquified natural gas) and pipelines technologies are not enough to unlock the enormous amounts of stranded natural gas not economically available to the markets. Chemical conversion of natural gas to liquid products (GTL technologies) is an innovative route which would in principle contribute to the exploitation of high amounts of reserves: the commercial application of such technologies, however, is site specific and must be carefully evaluated also in comparison with the conventional transportation routes. EniTecnologie has developed a technical-economical evaluation model based on a linear programming approach where all the main gas chemical conversion units are included: Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, Methanol and Dymethil ether production, natural gas wet fraction conversion to chemicals/liquid fuels. In this paper an application of such a model is presented to assess the prefeasibility of a natural gas conversion industrial complex in a specific geographic location: the economics of such complex are discussed with reference to two markets for the end products. Such economics are finally compared to LNG/pipeline transportation and technological breakthroughs in the gas conversion chain are addressed to identity the future impact of technology innovation on GTL routes.