Flowsheet Development and Simulation of Off-Shore Carbon Dioxide Removal System at Natural Gas Reserves

Carbon dioxide content in natural gas can cause corrosion and environmental issues. Most natural gas reserves in Malaysia contain 50 to 74 mol% of CO2. However, the capability of most existing acid gas treatment systems is limited to treat natural gas with CO2 content of 30 to 40 mol%. The purpose of this paper is to present preliminary study on the potential of an off-shore application of an adsorption system using aminated resin to capture CO2 at the natural gas reserves. This system is intended to reduce the CO2 content down to the capability of existing acid gas treatment. The flowsheet simulation based approach implemented in PETRONAS’ iCON and HYSYS process simulators is used to study the effect of temperature, pressure, adsorbent concentration and flow rate on the CO2 removal performance using the proposed system. For the assumed CO2 content of 70 mol% in the natural gas from reserves, the developed iCON and HYSYS models predict reduction to 11.8 mol% and 14 mol% of CO2 in the treated gas stream, respectively. The preliminary economic study indicates positive economic potential. Thus, the results showed that the aminated resin can be used for effective and efficient CO2 removal process using the proposed off-shore system from the natural gas stream.