Separation of Carbon Dioxide from Natural Gas using Inorganic Membrane

Nowadays, natural gas has become one of the most efficient energy in the globalization
uses. The principal constituent of natural gas is methane. Carbon dioxide is impurity in
natural gas. Separation of carbon dioxide from natural gas before continues to separate
each hydrocarbon is one of the important processes in natural gas processing. Membrane
is one low cost technology that gives promising performance in gas separation. The
objectives of project are to study on carbon dioxide and methane permeability and
selectivity, to study on carbon dioxide separation using inorganic membrane and to
study on membrane performance at certain operating conditions. The experimental
works were conducted using inorganic tubular membrane module in membrane pilot gas
to investigate permeability and selectivity for carbon dioxide and methane gas
individually at different feed flowrate of 1000 ml/min, 2000 ml/min and 3000ml/min
and feed pressure of 1, 3, and 5 bars with room temperature. Blending gas experimental
also been conducted to study on membrane separation performance and methane
recovery. As the result, it is found that higher flowrate and higher pressure gave higher
permeability until reach the constant value. Results show that for ideal selectivity for
CO2:CH4 was found to be range of 0.7 to 3.5. Selectivity reduced as feed pressure
increase, thus reduce methane recovery in retentate stream. At 15% carbon dioxide and
85% methane in feed concentration at 3 bar feed pressure, we got 94% methane
recovery in retentate stream, which was the highest recovery for all of experiments. We
found that increase carbon dioxide concentration from 15% to 30%, based on analysis,
has lower methane recovery in retentate stream. For the conclusion, the study shows that
the natural gas separation using inorganic tubular membrane module has a very
promising potential to be used for carbon dioxide and methane separation.