NGL Recovery Enhancements from Recycling Sweet Gas

Abstract This report discusses experienced lower C2 / C2+ recovery in NGL recovery unit of Saudi Aramco Khursaniyah Gas Plant Department (KGPD). The experienced lower recoveries were due to the unplanned outage of HP gas and no available HP gas feed to NGL plant. This led to uneven flow distribution of the gas through splits and turbo expander side which ultimately led to lower utilization of critical heat integrations affecting the temperature profile of the demethanizer column and eventually led to a lower C2 recovery overall. However, KGP has evaluated and applied an initiative solution of recycling over 100 MMSCFD of sweet gas back to the NGL train through the start-up line. The innovative solution boosted the C2 recovery to 95% from 84%. This special mode of operation of recycling sweet gas held for 8 days and after preforming the enhancement it was observed that NGL production was increased by 6.5 MBD with a total quantity of 52,000 BBL. Moreover, fuel gas quality improved as a result of lower C2+ components resulted in CO2 avoidance by 52% which represents a reduction of to 70 KTons of CO2.