Design of Contactor Vessel for C02 absorption from Natural Gas at Reserves using FLUENT

Natural gas (NG) is the most important energy source in various sectors and industries
not only for power generation, but also as a primary feedstock for chemicals, plastics
and fertilizers. Due to high demand of natural gas as an energy source, the explorations
of natural gas that contain more than 30 percent of CO2 become necessary. As C02 has
been the major global warming contributor to the earth which also degrades the quality
of natural gas and causing corrosion in refinery, this project aims to propose a new
absorption system that uses methyethanolamine (MEA) to pre-treat at the source and
lower the CO2 content before it enters the refinery. CO2 is treated with MEA along the
height of contactor vessel and the absorption rate is measured at temperature of 30°C
with the pressure range from 1 to 80 atm. This new absorption system is developed to
remove 6 to 10 percentofCO2 from natural gas stream i.e. the CO2 content is reduced to
20%before transporting the natural gas to the aminetreating unit. The work investigates
the effect ofoperationpressure and gas and solventvelocitieson CO2 concentration. The
pressures used are 1, 10, 50 and 80atm and the velocity of gas are 6 and 28m/s with
solvent superficial velocity of 0.016 and 0.055m/s. Studies shows that with the increase
in operation pressure and solvent velocity directly increases the CO2 removal efficiency.
Thisworkintroduces a feasible integration ofan absorption system to remove C02 at the
NG reserves.
Keyword: computational fluid dynamic (CFD), reactive absorption, immobilized
animatedresin, contactordesign,C02 absorption