Natural gas is proving to be the preferred fossil fuel energy resource for many environmental and business reasons and increasing attention regionally is focusing on sour gas. The natural gas shortage in the Middle East is an ongoing issue with respect to power and infrastructure needs, despite combined gas reserves within the GCC accounting for 1,500 trillion cubic feet.
The UAE is developing new sour gas resources in order to produce enough gas to meet demand and is turning its attention to field development in the North West Area in addition to the expansion of the production capacity of the Shah process plant. Recent announcements that Bechtel has been awarded the front end engineering design contract for Hail and Ghasha Islands and TechnipFMC for Dalma Gas Field are in keeping with ADNOC’s strategy for expansion of its sour field facilities having designated the PMC and artificial islands design and survey contracts to KBR and Artelia.
This project will be one of the largest of its type awarded globally to date and when operational will produce more than 1 billion cubic feet of gas per day, enough to generate electricity for around two million homes.
Recent experiences in this Shah plant expansion will be delivered in the opening paper from ADNOC Sour Gas at this year’s SOGAT conference. The theme for SOGAT 2018 is “Enhancing cost effective sour hydrocarbon treatment” and all conference presentations and training workshops will reflect this throughout the event including product launches within the SOGAT exhibition.
Optimising amine units
Of particular interest in the SOGAT conference will be a case study from Italy’s KTI on how to increase the capacity in an existing sulphur recovery unit. Another feature of the SOGAT Conference programme will be a demonstration from Egbert van Hoorn of SRE of how to optimise the operation of amine units to significantly increase the actual throughput and reduce the operating costs.
Van Hoorn is the world’s leading exponents of amine units and will be delivering a highly practical training amine treatment fundamentals workshop immediately before the conference. Within his workshop he will be concentrating on many aspects of trouble shooting, including foaming which is a problem currently being experienced here in the region. His workshop will be complimented by another workshop focusing on enhancing the operation of acid gas treatment units by correct and careful selection of filtration technologies that will be delivered by PALL, a market leader in this specialised aspect of sour hydrocarbon management.
A very important consideration in today’s market is plant energy efficiency and management and recent beneficial work from ADNOC Gas Processing will be presented in the conference to show how energy savings initiatives have been arrived at to achieve ADNOC’s 2020 target of reducing energy consumption by 10% and how they are being implemented in their Bu Hasa plant.
Finally, there are the economics of gas separation and the need to reduce total cost of ownership and lifecycle costs to ensure that fields are commercially viable. This includes the need for lower capital and operating costs through to the production of higher volumes of gas and condensate, and reduced maintenance and installation costs. If offshore, savings can also be gained from the minimising of the weight and footprint of gas separation facilities.
Answers on these points will be forthcoming from Twister BV who are exhibiting at SOGAT for the very first time along with Arkema who are launching SULFA-TEK at the conference, a new tool to help the maintenance and cleaning operations when sulphur deposition and plugging problems occur. Within the exhibition are various other international concerns participating for the first time such as PSE from the UK and TechnipFMC from France.
Thus SOGAT 2018 provides a one stop opportunity to engage and debate on the very latest findings in hydrocarbon management here within the Middle East region, where fields contain disproportionate amounts of H2S and CO2.
