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Optimizing your plant to achieve ideal pipeline quality of gas specification
Enrich the upstream processes of your gas plant using Pall’s custom solutions for your needs
The dehydration process utilizes glycol solvents to remove water from wet natural gas. The wet gas is contacted with lean glycol in the contactor tower. The rich glycol then flows into the regenerator, where heat separates the glycol from water, making it available for reuse. Water vapor exits at this regeneration stage and the process continues.
How do you use Glycol Dehydration to meet your plant needs?
In a more generalized idea, a plant’s goal is to achieve or exceed natural gas production quotas via a reliable treatment of wet gases, and maintain process reliability for consistency of production with minimum downtime. In the section below, we’ve laid out some of the most commonly faced challenges and their solutions, so you can iterate better along with Pall to increase a plant’s reliability:
- Let’s assume your plant is facing low production rates along with foaming and high water content sales gas, how do you achieve on-spec sales gas quality?
Without a doubt, our engineers recommend that you improve your dehydration productivity and reliability with effective liquid and solid removal upstream of the contactor to protect the glycol loop from foaming and fouling. Some effective methods of implementing this are:
- KO pots, mesh pads, cyclonic devices and conventional filter-separators may not effectively remove aerosol-sized liquid hydrocarbon droplets or fine solids.
- High efficiency SepraSol™ Plus liquid/gas coalescers and Medallion™ HP liquid/gas coalescers provide 99.999% removal at 0.3 microns per the DOP test and 1 ppb downstream per the modified ANSI/CAGI-400-1999 test procedure. Both offer excellent foaming protection.
- High efficiency coalescers can also be used downstream of the contactor on the dry gas to recover glycol mechanical losses and prevent carryover of glycol downstream.
2. Let’s assume your plant is facing poor dehydration performance and increased maintenance due to fouling of the contactor, lean-rich exchanger, generator and reboiler from dirty glycol, then how do you minimize operation and maintenance costs?
With a prime goal to reduce the gaps in productivity, reliability and gas water content through effective solids control in the glycol loop, here is what you must do:
- Solid particle contaminants in glycol systems are mostly very fine corrosion products that may not be adequately removed by filters that exhibit unloading, media migration, channeling or poor sealing.
- Therefore, a range of absolute and nominal rated filter elements is available to reduce suspended solids to <5 ppmw, keep the glycol clear in color, and reduce related foaming and fouling issues.