DEVELOPMENT OF PROCESS SIMULATION MODEL OF SOUR GAS PROCESSING PLANT

Abstract

With increasingly stringent environmental regulations, industries have to be more than ever vigilant in developing technologies for processing of raw materials. Fossil fuels processing involves several threats to the environment, sulfur emissions being the most imminent of them. Raw natural gas as obtained from wells is a mixture of various hydrocarbons in varying ratio and contains significant amounts of pollutants such as carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, mercaptans and nitrogen containing organic compounds. Consequently, raw natural gas is not suitable for downstream applications. Natural gas containing sulfur impurities is called a sour gas and the removal of these impurities is a process named sweetening of sour gas. The sweetening involves amine absorption process and thus generates two streams as output; sweetened natural gas ready to be used as fuel or as a feedstock for chemical industry and a mixture of gaseous impurities which, when rich in sulfur and carbon dioxide, is called acid gas. The scope of this project is to recover sulfur from acid gases coming from the absorption unit of a natural gas processing plant. The process chosen for sulfur recovery is a modified and a more efficient form of Claus Process, named Superclaus Process. This process introduces a specialized selective oxidation catalyst in the last of the three catalytic packed bed reactor. Focus is to bring the sulfur emissions to near zero by recovering the maximum elemental sulfur from the acid gas stream. This sulfur, in turn, will be used as a feedstock for many important and notable chemical manufacturing industries.