Shale Gas Monetization: Designing Separation Units for Feedstock Variability

Shale gas is abundant in the U.S. and this presents many opportunities in the chemical, petrochemical, and fuel industries. As with conventional natural gas, shale gas is primarily methane, but also may contain significant compositions of higher molecular weight hydrocarbons, and other impurities. This variability presents a technical challenge to processing the gas. This research is aimed at examining the economic tradeoff between treating and not treating gas of differing compositions.

In this work, the composition of the raw shale gas is based on literature data for wells in the Barnett Shale play located northwest of Dallas. Process simulators such as ProMax and ASPEN Plus were used to construct base-case scenarios, and to carry out process simulations for differing compositions with any necessary process modifications. A techno-economic analysis was done to estimate the associated costs and profitability of all the scenarios. The goal was to see if the additional revenue generated by treating gas of differing compositions is justified by the necessary process modifications.