In the past 2 decades, natural gas flaring and venting have increased due to the lack of transforming or transportation infrastructure in emerging shale-gas-producing regions. To reduce carbon emissions and wastage of shale resources, here, we report an alternative process hierarchy for natural gas liquid (NGL) to liquid fuel processes, which enables efficient valorization of shale resources on a small scale near the wellhead. While the conventional shale gas process follows a front-end separation, NGL activation, NGL upgrading hierarchy, our process introduces a hierarchy of NGL activation, NGL upgrading, back-end separation. This proposed hierarchy intensifies and simplifies the entire process by eliminating repeated or unnecessary unit operations and associated equipment. We illustrate the benefit of the proposed process hierarchy through synthesis, simulation, and analysis of an exemplary process via dehydrogenation followed by oligomerization. For small-scale plants, detailed simulation and economic analysis demonstrate this process to be economically attractive.

在过去的 20 年中，由于新兴页岩气产区缺乏改造或运输基础设施，天然气燃烧和放空有所增加。为了减少碳排放和页岩资源浪费，我们在此报告了液化天然气 (NGL) 到液体燃料工艺的替代工艺层次，它能够在井口附近小规模地实现页岩资源的有效增值。虽然常规页岩气工艺遵循前端分离、NGL 活化、NGL 升级层次，但我们的工艺引入了 NGL 活化、NGL 升级、后端分离的层次。这种建议的层次结构通过消除重复或不必要的单元操作和相关设备来强化和简化整个过程。我们通过脱氢和低聚反应的示例性过程的合成、模拟和分析来说明所提出的过程层次结构的好处。对于小型工厂，详细的模拟和经济分析表明该过程具有经济吸引力。