Environmental impacts of a natural gas dehydration plant- Simulation and Process Optimization

摘要

The natural gas dehydration process is employed to reduce the water content of the natural gas at high pressure to prevent hydrate formation and corrosion in natural gas processing. Typically, glycol solvents such as triethylen glycol (TEG) are utilized to remove water from natural gas through a high pressure absorption column. Natural gas includes some volatile organic compounds (VOCs) as well as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene, collectively named BTEX. The environmentally hazardous compounds (VOCs and BTEX) are absorbed by TEG in an absorption column resulting in the emission of such pollutants to the atmosphere during solvent purification in a stripper column. Therefore, it is imperative to estimate the emission rates of such pollutants to perform accurate exposure analyses for the workers of such plants and people residing nearby. This estimation is achieved by performing an accurate steady state simulation.