TRADITIONAL GAS PROCESSING
Over the past 30 years, Ortloff has developed a number of processes for efficient recovery of hydrocarbon liquids from natural gas and other gas streams. These processes offer many advantages over other processes available to gas processors, including higher recovery, better efficiency, greater simplicity, and better reliability.
These processes typically involve cooling an inlet gas stream prior to work expansion of the stream to provide some or all of the refrigeration required for the process. For rich gas streams, external refrigeration may also be applied in addition to the refrigeration provided by the turboexpander. The power recovered by the turboexpander is typically used to provide partial recompression of the residue gas stream following separation of the lighter and heavier components in a distillation column. Reflux streams appropriate for the type of product recovery required are provided to the distillation column. These reflux streams overcome the vapor-liquid equilibrium effects that limit the recovery potential of many processes. A typical gas processing scheme that can be used for both LPG and NGL recovery is shown in Figure 3 below.
These processes have been successfully used in plants as small as 10 MMSCFD and as large as 2,100 MMSCFD. This size range brackets the processing capacity of all re-gasification facilities that are presently in existence, in the design phase, or under construction. Further, the processing conditions around typical gas plant demethanizers/deethanizers are essentially the same as those used for LNG fractionation columns. So, although LNG fractionation has not yet been practiced on an industrial scale, the separation technology involved is well proven.
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