Sensitivity Analysis of Desulfurization Costs for Small-Scale Natural Gas Sweetening Units

Natural gas from stranded sources are vented or flared rather than being utilized due to high gathering and processing costs. One of the hurdles that must be overcome for utilizing these stranded resources is the lack of scalable and easily deployable gas sweetening technologies. In this paper, three gas sweetening technologies, triazine-based absorption, a liquid redox process called LO-CAT®, and a newly developed process called SourCat™, that can be operated at smaller scales necessary for sweetening sour gas from stranded resources are compared in terms of their desulfurization costs. A sensitivity analysis using the Morris-One-At-a-Time (MOAT) method is performed to investigate the sensitivity of desulfurization cost to process and economical parameters. The results revealed that the desulfurization cost of triazine-based absorption is most sensitive to raw material costs. The parameters that determine the sulfur content inside the system have the strongest impact on the cost of the LO-CAT® process. The desulfurization cost of the SourCat™ process is most dependent on the parameters related to sulfur that needs to be removed and H2S that needs to be adsorbed by the sorbent.