Avaliação econômica em colunas de destilação. Estudo de caso: processo de separação de gás natural em unidades de processamento de gás natural

Abstract

The development of the oil and gas industry along with concerns about the environment and the sustainability of the planet has made natural gas a competitive and attractive fuel in the market. The various purpose of the natural gas and its aspect of being a clean fuel has significantly increased its demand in the last years. Inside the natural gas industry, the processing in Natural Gas Processing Units is the most important and one of the most expensive steps in all the production chain. It is at this step that value is added to natural gas through fraction to be transformed into raw material to other industries or energy source. To meet the new natural gas demands, not only in Brazil, but in a global range, the natural gas industry will need to go through a magnification of its productive capacity, and one of the most important issues concerning the widening or implementation of an industrial process are the costs. Therefore, this work aims at estimating the implementation and operation costs of distillation columns used in NGPU, since these equipments have a greater impact on the process cost, through the ChemSep software, in order to validate the use of this software as a tool to estimate costs. The validation of this software has been done through the comparison of the results obtained in ChemSep with the results obtained through the Turton Methodology, which is most currently used in the industry and with the Douglas Methodology, in which ChemSep is based. The results obtained by ChemSep showed significant differences regarding both Turton Methodology and Douglas Methodology. However, despite the differences, the order of magnitude of the results obtained was the same, which makes ChemSep an imprecise tool to obtain real values, but a great tool to be used to compare many arrangements of the same process to determine which offers the best cost benefit according to the process objective.