Studying Operational Problems of Natural Gas Dehydration and Presenting Convenient Solving Methods to Reduce Them

فاقد چكيده

The water vapor in natural gas must be removed because of many reasons like preventing hydrate formation in gas transportation pipelines and fighting against corrosion in operational equipments. There are different methods for natural gas dehydration such as absorption by liquid absorber or adsorption by solid adsorbent. Regarding its lower installation cost, pressure drop and heat duty requirement for solvent recovery, plus ease of solvent recovery, absorption by using glycols (especially tri-ethylene glycol) has been the most common method for gas dehydration in the world. However, this method has its own operational problems like glycol losses and exposing pollutants to environment especially BTEX compounds. Considering extended applications of this method on the one side and the increasing number of environmental regulations to reduce pollutant emissions on the other side, many efforts have been done by researchers from gas industry sections to propose methods to reduce or solve these operational problems. Therefore in this paper after some introductory explanation about natural gas dehydration by glycols, operational problems of this method has been studied carefully and then some solutions to are presented.