(106c) Process Synthesis and Intensification for Shale Resources Valorization

Shale gas is a promising energy resource and chemical feedstock for the transition period towards a sustainable economy and has the potential to be a carbon source for the long term. However, huge amount of shale gas at remote shale gas basins is directly flared¹ due to the lack of infrastructure to transport the gas from the well head to the central processing plant. To avoid long distance transportation, it is essential to covert shale gas to value-added products on site at a distributed scale. The value-added product could be gasoline, diesel, aromatics, alcohols, or any other liquid chemicals which can be easily shipped. Unlike current shale gas process where large scales are preferred, simple and intensified processes with least processing steps and least pieces of equipment are favored for remote shale plays.

Natural gas liquids contained in shale gas are especially of interest since they are comparably easier to activate and transform to liquid products. In the current work, novel processes are developed to achieve the upgrading and more importantly, several key process intensification principles are identified which can be potentially applied to other processes that require a modular and intensified design. While conventional shale gas processing usually follows a hierarchy of “Front end separation- NGL activation – NGL upgrading”, our novel process introduces a new hierarchy of “NGL activation - NGL upgrading - Back end separation”. This paradigm shift of hierarchy intensifies and simplifies the entire process by eliminating repeated or unnecessary unit operations and associated equipment. A small scale process at the gas gathering station (10 MMSCFD) and a medium scale process at the gas processing plant (100 MMSCFD) are developed in this work. These processes are demonstrated, through detailed simulation and economic analysis, to be economically attractive.

Reference

1. Natural centers for environmental information. Global gas flaring observed from space. https://ngdc.noaa.gov/eog/viirs/download_global_flare.html (accessed 04/06/20)
2. Ridha, T., Li, Y., Gençer, E., Siirola, J. J., Miller, J. T., Ribeiro, F. H., & Agrawal, R. (2018). Valorization of Shale Gas Condensate to Liquid Hydrocarbons through Catalytic Dehydrogenation and Oligomerization. Processes, 6(9), 139.