(81a) Thermodynamic-Analysis-Based Design for Liquefied Natural Gas Receiving Terminal

Natural gas (NG) now has become the most promising alternate fuel energy.  Recently, the estimation about large quantity of technically recoverable unconventional NG, such as shale gas, has been announced by the Energy Information Administration (EIA), which draws more attention on the development of natural gas. In the work, we developed a novel configuration for liquefied natural gas (LNG) receiving terminal, integrated with LNG regasification process, shale gas liquefaction and NGL recovery process.  A great deal of cold energy from LNG regasification has been recovered through shale gas liquefaction and NGL fractionators’ condensers.    

The flexibility of the newly designed receiving terminal has also been addressed under different conditions, which include the changes of received LNG quantity and composition, transported shale gas quantity and composition, and heating value specified at local marketing place, etc.  Moreover, heat duty integration has been involved in this design, where thermodynamic theory is employed to analyze and fundamentally evaluate the performance.  All of the conditions together with thermodynamic and economic performance are integrated in a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model.  This model is solved using optimization tool GAMS and validated via rigorous simulations in ASPEN Plus.