Texaco owns leases to natural gas fields throughout the world that contain carbon dioxide at concentrations too high to allow the conomic production of the natural gas for sale. In some of these fields it may be possible to remove the carbon dixoide economically by using a membrane separatioin process. Texaco and GRI are conducting a jointly funded research program to scale up the production of novel GRI polymimides that have significantly better selectivities for the separation of carbon dioxide from methane than commercially available polymers. Our laboratory tests with mixed gases (carbon dixoide; nitrogen or methane) and dense polymer films have shown that these polyimide can be manufactured to have carbon dioxide/methane selectivity coefficients in the range of 83-100, compared to selectivity coefficients of 40-50 with commercially availabe polymidides, and 10-15 with commercially available cellulose-based polymers.
展开▼
