Development of Novel Approach to Remove Acid Gas from Natural Gas at Off-Shore Plants

The removal of acid gas from natural gas at offshore plant is critical to meet international environmental and safety regulations. Furthermore, the production rate at offshore oil and gas fields is steadily increasing relative to the production rate at onshore fields. Hence, this study focuses on methods to enhance the overall efficiency of the AGRU (Acid Gas Removal Unit) utilized in the topside of offshore plants by considering various acid gas removal technologies such as adsorption, absorption and membrane-based separation. In particular, this research focuses on absorption using amine-based chemical solvents: a commonly used method in industry, combined with membrane-based separation: a method that is suitable for offshore environment conditions such as rocking motion or permanent tilt. The effects of various different factors are analyzed including the efficiency of various types of amine solvents and configuration of the absorption/membrane systems which are assessed based on their economic feasibility including capital and operating costs, etc. This work investigates and proposes effective designs for the AGRU used in the topside of offshore plants.

 

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).