Retrofitting recycled stripping gas in a glycol dehydration regeneration unit

Natural gas dehydration is essential in gas processing to avoid serious problems. As a pretreatment in a cryogenic Natural Gas Liquid (NGL) recovery process, it typically uses triethylene glycol (TEG) and followed by a Molecular Sieve dehydration to achieve 1 mg/Sm3 of water moisture in the dehydrated gas. This work studied the retrofitting of the existing dehydration unit to improve its performance in satisfying the gas moisture qualities. The retrofitted process uses recycled stripping gas schemes to achieve high purity TEG while minimizing the use of fresh stripping gas. The results revealed that the recycled stripping gas has provided sufficiently high purity TEG (>99.99%-wt), significantly reduced the heating and cooling duty by 80%, and reduced the electrical duty by 29% compared to the base case. The TAC was reduced by 38.1% from $ 725,245/year to $ 448,670/year. Through this study, the evaluated cases provide similar dehydration results with less equipment, simpler process, more energy-efficient, and better economic numbers. Therefore, a better process was obtained.