Sour Gas Permeation: Evaluation of Commercially Available Polymers and Their Modified Analogues for Natural Gas Separations with High H2S Content

Saudi Arabia owns one of the largest proven reserves of natural gas in the world. Many of these reserves are deemed sub-quality due to associated high H₂S concentration. Sub-quality natural gas with high H₂S levels is referred to as sour gas. The presence of this component significantly increases processing and capital costs associated with amine scrubbing. In some cases, H₂S concentration is too high for the reserve to be produced economically; therefore, these wells would be under produced or simply left in the ground. Membranes with high selectivity and that are stable towards sour gas can be used to reduce bulk H₂S concentration at the well head and/or prior to an amine scrubber in order to debottleneck downstream processing units. Such a configuration has the potential to lower capital and operating costs associated with producing and processing highly sour streams, as well as increase the production of previously underutilized sour gas reserves. This presentation compares various commercially available polymers as well as modified versions of them for their separation performance under a variety of sour gas feed streams.