APPLICATION OF TWISTER SUPERSONIC GAS-LIQUID SEPARATOR FOR IMPROVED NATURAL GAS RECOVERY IN A PROCESS STREAM

Natural gas is one of the most precious natural resources that generates foreign earnings for its host nation. Energy is the building block of modern society and natural gas is one of the cleanest primary energy sources. The production and subsequent recovery of natural gas is a challenging aspect of the entire natural gas value chain. One of the problems associated with natural gas utilization is the extraction and conditioning of the gas, as most of the fractions are extracted with certain percentages of water and other contaminants. To solve the problem of liquid carryover and gas entrainment in gas processing and recover an excellent volume of gas, several types of gas separators have been developed. This case study aims to solve the problem of gas wastage and recurrent plant downtime. Notore Chemical Industries is our focus as one of the largest natural gas consumers, situated in Rivers State Nigeria. The company has several plant downtimes due to the inefficiency of the conventional separator. The inefficiency of the installed knock-out drum separator in dispersing the condensate from the feed supplied by Nigerian Gas Company (NGC) and delivering the required dry gas to the plant battery limit has been one of the leading causes of the plant recording downtime. This work presents a reliable separation process using the Twister supersonic gas separator to recover a high percentage of dry natural gas (Methane). Feed gas data was collected from the plant after several visits and a computer-based simulation was conducted. From the simulation using the Aspen Hysys package, it was seen that the Twister supersonic gas separator is more efficient than the knockout drum separator. Less methane and less condensate were produced using the knockout drum separator at 0.699% and 0.092% respectively while the Twister supersonic gas separator produced methane and condensate at 95.15% and less condensate at 0.0047% respectively.