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 systemsis 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.