Globally, there is a need to replace our dependence on fossil fuels as the main source of energy.This requires a shift towards renewable and sustainable alternatives. The well-established Fischer-Tropsch (FT) synthesis is a potential process route to produce liquid fuels and speciality chemicals and address this challenge. FT synthesis is a polymerisation reaction in which syngas, a mixture of CO and H 2 , is converted to hydrocarbon products ranging from methane to wax when low temperature conditions are used. Subsequent product upgrading steps allow high quality liquid fuels to be obtained which are clean burning. This will help to mitigate the impact of human activity on the environment.The versatility of this process route is attributed to the ability of syngas to be generated from any carbon-containing feed such as coal, natural gas or biomass. The latter is attractive to enable a shift to a more sustainable way of living. Particularly for biomass-to-liquid plants, the high cost of syngas generation means that FT synthesis should use syngas as efficiently as possible. This requires an effective description of the FT reaction kinetics. This study therefore focuses on the development of a kinetic model for low temperature FT (LTFT) synthesis to improve understanding of the reaction behaviour and aid in the development of a biomass-to-liquid process route.Although the kinetics of the FT reactions under the low temperature conditions of 180-260 • C and 20-30 bar(a) have been extensively studied, the challenge to kinetic model development is the large number of possible reaction products. A common simplification is to consider the formation of the main products only, which are linear n-paraffins and 1-olefins. The polymerisation character of FT synthesis means that its product distribution could ideally be described using models based on probability theory. Deviations from probability theory distribution, however, occur especially at the conditions of LTFT synthesis. These deviations are a high methane yield, low ethene yield and the change from mainly 1-olefins at low carbon number to mainly n-paraffins at high carbon number. Comprehensive kinetic models in literature focus on finding a kinetic explanation for these deviations. These kinetic models, however, cannot easily be used with few being extended to include the formation of products of higher carbon number.An aspect ignored in current kinetic model development is that FT synthesis shares many aspects of an equilibrium-controlled process. This is since CO hydrogenation which leads to monomer formation is the rate-determining step for the FT reactions. Consequently, the rate of chain growth is rapid in comparison. This leads to the distribution of n-paraffins and 1-olefins being controlled by equilibrium. By modelling FT synthesis as an equilibrium-controlled process, the kinetic model formulation could be simplified, consist of fewer rate expressions and contain the minimum number of model parameters without compromising on prediction quality. At the condi...