Abstract
Natural gas sweetening is required to remove the acid gas CO2 to meet gas grid specifications. Membrane technology has a great potential in this application compared to the state-of-the-art amine absorption technology. Carbon membranes are of particular interest due to their high CO2/CH4 selectivity of over 100. In order to document the advantages of carbon membranes for natural gas (NG) sweetening, HYSYS simulation and cost evaluation were conducted in this work. A two-stage carbon membrane process with recycling in the second stage was found to be technically feasible to achieve >98% CH4 with <2% CH4 loss. The specific natural gas processing cost of 1.122 × 10−2 $/m3 sweet NG was estimated at a feed pressure of 90 bar, which was significantly dependent on the capital-related cost. Future work on improving carbon membrane performance is required to increase the competitiveness of carbon membranes for natural gas sweetening.
Highlights
Natural gas (NG) is becoming one of the most attractive and growing fuels for world primary energy consumption because it is a cleaner energy source compared to other fossil fuels like coal and crude oil [1,2]
Raw natural gas produced from gas wells usually contains light and heavy hydrocarbons (HHCs) and other impurities, such as H2 O, H2 S, and CO2
Commercial polymeric membranes used for natural gas sweetening, such as cellulose acetate (CA), cellulose triacetate (CTA), and polyimide (PI), have relatively low separation performance
Summary
Natural gas (NG) is becoming one of the most attractive and growing fuels for world primary energy consumption because it is a cleaner energy source compared to other fossil fuels like coal and crude oil [1,2]. Commercial polymeric membranes used for natural gas sweetening, such as cellulose acetate (CA), cellulose triacetate (CTA), and polyimide (PI), have relatively low separation performance (i.e., low CO2 /CH4 selectivity and low CO2 permeance) due to membrane compaction and plasticization [10], which lead to high costs due to a larger required membrane area and a shorter lifetime. This indicates the need to develop novel, high performance membranes materials. There are still challenges to Membranes 2018, 8, 118; doi:10.3390/membranes8040118 www.mdpi.com/journal/membranes
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