GreenPath Energy Ltd. & Process Ecology
March 30, 2017
Executive Summary
Benzene emissions from glycol dehydration units are regulated in Western Canada. In addition, Alberta has initiated a methane emission reduction plan for the oil and gas sector. The major challenge in reducing emissions from dehydration systems is designing systems to capture the gas from the flash tank vent and still column (glycol regenerator) overheads. The still column operates at atmospheric conditions and the vented gas is wet; this leads to additional effort to design a system to handle for wet vapour at low pressures.
Several technologies have been proposed to reduce BTEX emissions (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylenes) from glycol dehydration units such as combustion (flare/incinerator), Kenilworth combustion, SlipStream, JATCO BTEX Eliminator, vapour recovery units (VRU), and condensing tanks (such as TankSafe). GasPro Compression Corp. has recently developed a vapour recovery unit to reduce/eliminate BTEX emissions from glycol dehydration plants. The GasPro BTEX VRU unit addressed in this study has been installed as a trial unit at a dehydration facility in Central Alberta since February 2016. This report presents the results obtained between December 2016 and March 2017 from the data collection, engineering simulation and modelling of the dehydration plant and GasPro BTEX VRU unit as well as a leak survey done by GreenPath Energy. The objective of the study is to obtain the GasPro VRU technology emissions reduction efficiency and to investigate the benefits and challenges of the technology.