Enhancing the Supersonic Gas Separation operating envelope through process control strategies of the feed conditioning plant for offshore CO2 removal from natural gas
Section snippets
CO2 separation from natural gas
Natural gas is a vital component of the world’s energy supply. It is the cleanest, safest and most useful of all energy sources. Natural gas is a mixture of hydrocarbon gases and the composition varies according to where it is found. Most of the composition is made up of methane, which usually makes up to 80–95 % of the gas. The remaining is made up of other hydrocarbon gases, such as ethane, propane, butane and others. Other elements, like carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulphide, mercury, nitrogen
Methods
The overall flowchart on the methods adopted in this paper is as shown in Fig. 2. The work includes steady state and dynamic simulation of the feed conditioning plant of the SGS and process control design evaluation. The optimum process parameters for the supersonic separator are identified based on existing data and the dynamic simulation and process control design are conducted based on the steady state simulation work.
Results & discussion
In this section, the results of process control strategies CS1 and CS2 are studied and reported. The comparative analysis between PID and MPC is also discussed.
Conclusion & recommendation
Supersonic Gas Separation technology has been identified as one of the most promising technology for CO2 removal application. Stringent requirement of SGS technology which are specifically high pressure (∼80 bar), cryogenic temperature (∼−50 °C) and CO2 composition (20∼25 mol% CO2) further makes it crucial to properly design optimal control strategies which can cater for feed disturbances in the feed conditioning plant. If one of the variables failed to be controlled within its tolerable limit,
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank MRA project 0153B2-E53 (PETRONAS Research Sdn. Bhd. (PRSB)) for the funding provided and Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS for the support provided in this work.
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