Natural Gas Treatment Using Adsorptive Separation

Abstract

Pressure Swing Adsorption based process has been designed for the removal of Propane and higher alkanes from Natural Gas. The feed gas had six components and was available at a pressure as high as 34 bar a. The raffinate requires to have as low content of Propane and higher alkanes as far as possible and come at a pressure higher than 20 bara for downstream use. The oper ating temperature was ambient value and the operating adsorption pressure was also equal to 34 bara. The adsorbent physically adsorbs the components in the following order: Butanes>Propane>Ethane>Methane. Natural Gas pre-treatment thus belongs to the type of raffinate PSA systems wherein the desired product is the weakly adsorbed component. Extended Langmuir adsorption isotherm parameters for each of the six comp onents of the feed mixture were estimated from the pure component Langmuir isotherm data available in the literature.