Prospective of Upfront Nitrogen (N2) Removal in LNG Plants: Technical Communication

Conventional natural gas (NG) liquefaction processes remove N-2 near the tail of the plant, which limits production capacity and decreases energy efficiency and profit. Engineering calculations suggest that upfront N-2 removal could have substantial economic benefits on large-scale liquefied natural gas (LNG) processes. This article provides an overview of the most promising technologies that can be employed for upfront N-2 removal in the LNG process, focusing on the process selection and design considerations of all currently available upfront N-2 removal technologies. The literature review revealed that although adsorption has proven to be a huge success in gas separation processes (efficiency >= 90%), most of the available adsorbents are CH4-selective at typical NG conditions. It would be more encouraging to find N-2-selective adsorbents to apply in upfront N-2 removal technology. Membrane gas separation has shown growing performance due to its flexible operation, small footprint, and reduced investment cost and energy consumption. However, the use of such technology as upfront N-2 removal requires multi-stage membranes to reduce the nitrogen content and satisfy LNG specifications. The efficiency of such technology should be correlated with the cost of gas re-compression, product quality, and pressure. A hybrid system of adsorption/membrane processes was proposed to eliminate the disadvantages of both technologies and enhance productivity that required further investigation. Upfront N-2 removal technology based on sequential high and low-pressure distillation was presented and showed interesting results. The distillation process, operated with at least 17.6% upfront N-2 removal, reduced specific power requirements by 5% and increased the plant capacity by 16% in a 530 MMSCFD LNG plant. Lithium-cycle showed promising results as an upfront N-2 chemical removal technology. Recent studies showed that this process could reduce the NG N-2 content at ambient temperature and 80 bar from 10% to 0.5% N-2, achieving the required LNG specifications. Gas hydrate could have the potential as upfront N-2 removal technology if the is process modified to guarantee significant removals of low N-2 concentration from a mixture of hydrocarbons. Retrofitting the proposed technologies into LNG plants, design alterations, removal limits, and cost analysis are challenges that are open for further exploration in the near future. The present review offers directions for different researchers to explore different alternatives for upfront N-2 removal from NG.