Improving the performance of the hydrogen sulfide absorption tower

Abstract

During natural gas processing, absorption towers are usually used to get rid of Hydrogen Sulfide. The goal of the study is improving the performance of

acid gas absorption towers that use amine (DEA) through the use of heteroamines (MEA, MDEA), and compare them in terms of the rate of amine absorption of Hydrogen Sulfide , the size of the absorption tower, the amine losses, the energy required to reprocess the amine, the varying annual costs, and the environmental impact by calculating the emission rate of BTEX gases (benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene, and xylene). In addition, it aims to illustrate the effect of increasing the number of absorption stages by conducting a research on Deir Attia Gas Well.

The study found that in the case of the Deir Attia Well ( with a flow of 150000 m³/day), during the refining process, the amine (MEA) is the cheapest in terms of annual costs and the amine (MDEA) is the least contaminating. It is advisable to use the least polluting solutions (MDEA) during the treatment process at low or average flow rate, because its impact on the costs is negligible. Besides, it was concluded that by increasing the number of refining stages by one, we obtained a more pure gas.