Development of Novel Approach to Pretreat Natural Gas at Off-Shore Plants

The production rate from offshore oil and gas fields has been more rapidly increasing over the past decades than the production rate from onshore fields. In general, the natural gas should go through several processing steps to meet sales gas specifications, and it typically consists of gas sweetening, drying and mercury removal processes. Hence, this study focused on methods to enhance an overall efficiency of the AGRU (Acid Gas Removal Unit) with dehydration, utilized on the topside of offshore plants by considering various technologies such as adsorption, absorption and membrane-based separation. In particular, this research considered absorption using amine-based chemical solvents; a commonly used method in industry, combined with membrane-based separation for AGRU. For this, we studied economic feasibility based on various configurations of the membrane/absorption systems. The analysis included capital and operating costs, product specification, methane loss, etc.   

Acknowledgement

 This work was supported by a research project of “Development of Integrated Interactive Model for Subsea and Topside System to Evaluate the Process Design of Offshore Platform”, funded by Ministry of Trade (project No. 10060099).