Natural gas liquids (NGL) recovery in the liquefied natural gas production

This paper focuses on the energy benefits of two configurations of natural gas liquids (NGL) recovery and LNG liquefaction under various feed gas and operating conditions. Simulation results show that specific power consumption is affected by the process configurations and feed conditions. An integrated NGL recovery within natural gas (NG) liquefaction unit is found to be the most energy efficient configuration while a front-end NGL recovery unit is the least. As methane concentration of feed gas decreases, an integrated NGL recovery within the liquefaction unit has an increase of 0.74% in energy consumption while a decrease of 0.18% of the same is observed for a front-end NGL recovery unit. When the methane concentration in natural gas is greater than 95%, both processes have almost the same specific OPEX.