A comparative study for natural gas treatment by amine process and membrane

Title : A comparative study for natural gas treatment by amine process and membrane

Abstract:

Natural gas needs treatment as it contains amounts of carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide that can damage pipelines. Amine unit is widely used for the treatment but the process is energy intensive and suffers from solvent flooding. Alternatively, the membrane can treat natural gas with no flooding issue and lower energy input. In this work, a commercial membrane unit was simulated in UniSim® for the treatment of Kuwait sour gas to produce a gas that meets pipeline specifications. The system was compared to the amine unit in terms of product quality and quantity. Results show that the membrane system was not capable of reaching the performance of the amine process due to the tradeoff limitation in membranes between product purity and gas recovery.

Keywords: natural gas, sour gas, gas-separation membrane, amine process, UniSim®.

Biography:

Dr. Yousef Alqaheem is a research scientist at the Petroleum Research Center of Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research. He received his PhD degree in 2015 from Newcastle University (United Kingdom). Alqaheem prepared and evaluated polymeric membranes for hydrogen separation, oxygen enrichment, and carbon dioxide capture. He also developed membrane units in process simulators such as UniSIM® and CAPE-OPEN. Currently, he has a project with the refinery to assess the membranes for propane/propylene separation from technical and economic points of view. Alqaheem published 23 papers in refereed journals and presented 5 conference papers.