Investigation of effect of process parameters variation in an Iranian natural gas dehydration plant

摘要

A natural gas dehydration plant, including both stripping and recovery section, is studied in this paper in order to investigate the major effective parameters and their influences over the dehydration process efficiency. This plant is stated in southern part of Iran and uses diethylene glycol as the dehydrating agent. The whole unit was simulated using a steady state flow-sheet simulator. The main goal of this study is to reveal whether or not the whole process could be optimized and to perform a sensitivity analysis using acquired data from both simulation and the field data. The most important dependant factors which were used in the sensitivity analysis are volatile organic compounds (VOC) emission, dry gas dew point, solvent loss, and process total duty. The output data from the simulator infer that VOC emission is massively sensitive to increment of purity or mole flow of the solvent. Eventually, by considering all of the operation criteria; it was revealed that a ten percent increase in solvent mole flow is applicable in order to reduce dry gas dew point up to six percent without a significant raise in the dehydration unit's total energy consumption and environmental pollutant.