(201b) Shale Gas Techno-Economic Analysis: Designing Separation Units to Handle Feedstock Variability
AIChE Spring Meeting and Global Congress on Process Safety
2018
2018 Spring Meeting and 14th Global Congress on Process Safety
18th Topical Conference on Gas Utilization
Plant Design and Energy Integration
Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - 3:10pm to 3:35pm
In this work a literature review of conventional and alternate technologies for processing shale gas was performed. Composition of the raw shale gas was based on literature data for wells in the Barnett Shale play located northwest of Dallas. Process simulators such as ProMax, ASPEN HYSYS, and ASPEN Plus were used to construct base-case scenarios, and to carry out process simulations for differing compositions with any necessary process modifications. A techno-economic analysis was done to estimate the associated costs and profitability of all the scenarios. Once this was done an optimal design was chosen and validated for a variety of compositions. Additionally a sensitivity analysis was done to see the effect of the various costs (fixed costs, variable costs, raw shale gas price, product prices) on profitability.