IMPROVING THE ENERGY BALANCE OF THE ASTRAKHAN GAS PROCESSING PLANT BY UTILIZING THE HEAT OF THE SECONDARY ENERGY RESOURCES

摘要

Gas Processing Plants (GPP) are major consumers of electric and heat energy used in various technological operations involved in natural gas processing. A survey of the process units of several GPPs carried out by the VNIIGAS has revealed that the plants have a substantial amount of secondary energy resources (SER) at their disposal. These are steam condensate past the reboilers, reboil-ing (secondary boiling) steam, flares, separator gas, heat of afterburning of tail gases of Claus furnaces, exhaust gases of compressor units having a gas turbine drive designed to feed the processed natural gas into trunk pipelines. In this context, an urgent task is to alter the structure of energy use at the GPP and to widely utilize the secondary heat resource, which is one of the vast reserves of heat and electric power saving in the gas industry. In general, in designs of natural gas processing plants, the heat from the process streams is tapped in the air cooling devices (ACD), whereupon a huge amount of heat at temperatures ranging from 90 to 155癈 is lost irreversibly to the atmosphere, and, moreover, electric power is required to drive the air cooler fans. Furthermore, at the GPP there are excess SER as heat of the steam having a pressure of 0.45 MPa in the summer time (April through September) in the amount of up to 40 tons/h. In order to tap the heat from this steam flow, a system with a heat load of 67.2 MW has been specially built to condense and cool the steam condensate.