Natural Gas Sweetening Process Design

For decades to come, gas will be the energy source of choice to meet worldwide environmental standards. Fortunately gas reserves are growing; but new gas is often found to be of substandard quality in remote and / or stranded areas of the world. When natural wellhead or oil field associated gases are highly loaded with acid gases, the dilemma facing most operators is what to do, how and when to best exploit these poor quality resources. Today the advanced activated MDEA process offers economy and versatility in handling both selective and complete acid gas removal services. The process has a good synergy with modern Claus sulfur recovery processes and remains among the best alternatives even when no sulfur recovery is foreseen. Nevertheless, there are limitations of even the most advanced amines only based gas treatment technologies in handling very highly acid gas loaded natural or associated oil field gases; especially for bulk acid gas removal when the acid gases are destined for cycling and / or disposal by reinjection. Today cycling and disposal by re-injection offers a promising alternative to avoid sulfur production and reduce CO2 emissions to the atmosphere simultaneously. To this end, technologies of choice are those which offer maximum simplicity and require least downstream processing intensity and power for re-injection.