Natural Gas Processing - Nitrogen Removal from Natural Gas

The growing demand on natural gas leads to the necessity to upgrade sub-quality gas. This sub-quality gas partly contains high amounts of nitrogen and/or carbon dioxide sometimes helium is even a component of natural gas. To achieve pipeline and sales gas specification it is necessary to remove non desired components.Higher hydrocarbons such as ethane propane butane and pentane and he­lium can form valuable by-products. It is economically feasible to recover helium if the amount in natural gas is higher than 0.1 mol%.Some of the recovery processes are well known from air separation:- Cryogenic single column.- Cryogenic double column.- Adsorption (Pressure Swing Adsorption PSA).In the last decades three additional processes were introduced into gas processing industry:- Absorption (Mehra ProcessSM).- Adsorption (Molecular GateTM).- Membrane Separation.This book gives a short overview of above mentioned processes and compares the processes in technical and economical aspects.