Fast Screening Method to Prioritize Underground Gas Storage Structures for Site Selection

摘要

The supply-demand misbalances of natural gas require the creation of Underground Gas Storage (UGS) especially during peak period and these UGS' facilities will probably play an important role in gas market development. Since last century, UGS sites have been used to store natural gases. However there is a key concern in managers' mind that they have limited budget and several candidate fields/structures for this purpose. Techno-economic analysis shows that the constructions of UGS for all fields/structures are not justified, although gas storage schemes are vital for Iran to meet peak energy needs. For choosing proper candidate among several alternatives, first of all, many factors have been extracted for deciding whether to store gas and, more specifically, the type of structures that should be used in a particular case in this article. In addition, a pre-screening procedure has been planned to omit disqualified UGS sites for avoiding expenses in the next steps based on killer parameters. In this step six different criteria have passed through pre-screening phase. Also, a decision tree has been drawn based on four main parameters; technical, economical, geographical & environmental and passive defend parameters, to prioritize potential of fields for UGS execution based on expert's opinions. This decision tree is broken down to three sub-levels for more than 60 subsidiary parameters. After drawing decision tree all the subparameters will be evaluated, ranked & weightened relative to each other based on Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique. Finally, this methodology can be applied to different fields/structures to prioritize them for selecting appropriate sites of underground gas storage and the best choice to execute this technology on, can then be selected. The techniques described in this article should be used by decision makers and managers to select the proper and potential site for UGS.