(48af) New Opportunities for Gas-Oil Separation Plants Energy Efficiency Optimization

Nowadays, as the cost of energy is increasing and the energy-based greenhouse gas emissions are impacting the climate, the retrofit of heat exchanger network (HEN) while seems essential for improving energy efficiency in process industries it is not enough without taking into consideration the portions of the plant’s which were off-limit for process integration in the past. For instance, an industrial gas oil separation plant may need to be retrofitted several times throughout its lifetime to improve its energy efficiency and/or to meet the needs for increased production rate. In the old days the dis-integration between the oil section and the gas section was preferred by plants’ operators. Nowadays, plant engineers started to accept more levels of integration among the plants’ areas of integrity to save more energy and reduce the energy-based GHG emissions. In this paper typical industrial application in one of Saudi Aramco’s big GOSP is demonstrated. In this industrial application…the utilization of Gas compression waste heat to air coolers are currently used in the process. This facility consists of mainly two process plants one is Oil Train which consists of unit like GOSPs and Gas Compression and other one is Gas Train which consists of units like Dew Point Control and NGL Fractionation. In this paper we conducted Energy Targeting for the complete facility based on three different envelopes Oil Train, Gas Train and both Oil and Gas Train. Potential saving possible in the process is estimated for all the cases and based on the estimated potential savings we selected the most practical envelope for conducting Heat Integration among the process stream. As a result of this analysis, the most beneficial and practically possible envelope was found to be in oil train, and that to utilize compression waste heat in the oil trains stabilizer reboiler. To carry out this heat integration a practical design was proposed and later this process design was modified in a way so that more heat integration can be done among the process streams. The design was optimized from capital efficiency point of view too. The steam saved from the heat integration is maximized for the monetary savings. Among various options available for utilization of saved steam, it was selected to produce chilling effect for Gas Train using Absorption Chillers. Though there are many elements attached to the study but this paper demonstrate the importance of modifying the process for better integration opportunities and consequently minimizing utility consumption and maximizing profits.