Using operations research to optimise operation of the Norwegian natural gas system

Decisions regarding natural gas production, processing and transportation depend on each other, and knowledge about how partial changes in a gas transmission network influence the network capacity and flexibility is crucial in ensuring efficient system operation. SINTEF has developed a decision support tool, GassOpt, which is based on mixed-integer optimisation. The model objective is to maximise the flow throughput or profit for a given technical state of a natural gas network. The objective of this work has been to develop extensions to the GassOpt model mainly related to modelling of gas processing and energy consumption related to compression, and to analyse their impact on network operation. The extended GassOpt model represents and analyses a gas transport network in more detail, in particular in discovering bottlenecks, related to gas quality, contaminants and energy efficiency, which have obtained increased focus in recent time. GassOpt is a general tool for gas network optimisation, but applied on the Norwegian gas transport network specifically. The GassOpt tool is used to evaluate the current network as well as possible network extensions. Our approach ensures optimal operation of the network by considering the complete system and provides valuable insights in the dependencies between the different parts of the system. Tests show that the model represents actual network operation in a very good way.