Challenges and Lessons Learned: Rotating Packed Bed (RPB) Technology for Acid Gas Removal

Abstract

Abstract Natural gas produced from many major reservoirs can contain high amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) and must be treated to meet typical specifications for pipelines or liquefaction plant feed (Hassan et. al 2018). These treatment processes often require high-pressure operations forming highly concentrated CO2-rich streams. There are many factors that can be stumbling block for the development of such a field with high contaminants of CO2. World high CO2 gas field distribution is shown in Figure 1 (Burgers et al. 2011), some of the fields are stranded due to high CO2 content and not economically attractive to develop due to current oil price. Hydrocarbon resources with high CO2 content from 15 to 80% mol most of the fields are in south-east Asia, northern Africa, Europe, Brazil, Australia and USA, these fields are still undeveloped or under-develop. There is a need for "game changing" technology to overcome this barrier. It is not as simple as developing other green fields, the challenge is more on separation technology and heat integration, to meet project economics. Not only that, CCUS (Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage) is also a challenge whereby the produced CO2 from reservoir needs to be store back to geological storage or to convert it into other useful products (Hassan et. al 2018).