Designing of Mini - Refinery

Abstract

Natural-gas condensate is a low-density mixture of hydrocarbon liquids that are present as gaseous components in the raw natural gas produced from many natural gas fields. It condenses out of the raw gas if the temperature is reduced to below the hydrocarbon dew point temperature of the raw gas. Natural gas condensates are ultra-light crudes, generally having up to 98% distillates below 360°C. Varieties of products are obtained from fractionation of natural gas condensate like naphtha, kerosene, diesel and some fraction of LPG. That is why the demand of condensate increases day by day. Distillation column is used for the separation of different fraction of condensate. To evaluate different designs, simulators have become very handy. Several softwares have been developed for the petroleum industries. ASPENTM HYSYS 3.2 is one of the software which is widely accepted and used for refinery simulation.ASPENTM HYSYS 3.2 performs the oil distillation calculation through detail plate by plate calculation. This calculation includes generating pseudo-components from the ASTM D86 data and generating properties from them. ASPENTM HYSYS 3.2 contains an oil manager which organizes the data for the pseudo-components separately. The project is about process design for setting up a 15000-20000 TPA natural gas condensate Splitter / Mini Refinery. However, the product mix will depend on the type of feed available and the ASTM D86 analysis report. The aim of this project is to establish design basis and develop complete basic engineering package for the condensate splitter inclusive Tray column hydraulics and estimation of tray efficiency in order to calculate actual number of plates and finally thermal design of condensor is carried out.