Analyzing Tri-Ethylene Glycol (TEG) Gas Dehydration System Performance of a Gas Processing Plant (GPP) with HYSYS Modeling

Gas processing plant (GPP) converts gas reservoir’s raw natural gases to produce sales gas, which is high price commodity in the market. Sales gas specification from buyer typically required processed gas with small amount of water to avoid pipelines corrosion, avoid hydrates formation in the gas and for their immediate industry consumption. GPP is equips with gas dehydration system facilities to absorb water from raw gas and most of the gas dehydration processes are using tri-ethylene glycol (TEG) process unit.
It is often unknown to operator the actual concentration of TEG used due to lack of equipment to analyze it. The operator’s priority is to simply meet sales gas specification in term of water content in dry gas without acknowledging the integration of essential variables such as water content in wet gas, TEG circulation rate, TEG concentration and performance of regeneration system.
The project aims in developing performance analysis tool of TEG gas dehydration system to assist plant operations in understanding the current system operations and performance. The project aims in achieving two main objectives, which are developing accurate plant simulation model using Aspen HYSYS software and developing reasonable analysis of gas dehydration system. Accurate plant simulation is important as it is supplies necessary estimation values which are unavailable in plant to carry out the analysis calculation. The analysis should be reasonable to ensure it suits the plant operations and useful to operator.
Objectives successfully achieved where, the simulation model is accurate and the analysis is able to deduce four analyses which are essential in TEG gas dehydration system. This project successfully discovered potential optimization to improve GPP plant performance.