Natural gas reserves with 0.3–2 mol% helium are considered as the only viable source for this noble gas. Currently, cryogenic separation is used to extract helium, but it is energy-intensive. While membrane-based separation is a promising alternative, it is still not considered economical. Even for an inorganic/silica membrane with relatively high selectivity and permeance, a multi-stage membrane system with inter-stage compression is required, which necessitates high CAPEX and OPEX. This study proposes a novel process to enhance the selectivity and permeance of an inorganic/silica membrane system to eliminate the costly inter-stage compression. A 16–24% reduction in the CAPEX and 23–57% in the OPEX are achievable for a natural gas feed with 3–5 mol% helium. In contrast, for a 2 mol% helium feed, the OPEX increases by 34%. However, a 30% decrease in the capital cost outweighs the OPEX increase to make the new process more profitable.

氦气含量为0.3–2 mol％的天然气被认为是这种稀有气体的唯一可行来源。当前，低温分离用于提取氦气，但是它是高能耗的。尽管基于膜的分离是一种有前途的替代方法，但仍认为它不经济。即使对于具有相对高的选择性和渗透性的无机/二氧化硅膜，也需要具有级间压缩的多级膜系统，这需要高的CAPEX和OPEX。这项研究提出了一种新颖的方法来增强无机/二氧化硅膜系统的选择性和渗透性，从而消除昂贵的级间压缩。对于含3-5 mol％氦气的天然气，可将CAPEX降低16–24％，将OPEX降低23–57％。相比之下，对于2摩尔％的氦气进料，OPEX增加了34％。然而，