NGL Plant at Port Said

Port Said NGL Plant has been designed for deep extraction of NGL cut from a mixed feed gas; it is classified as one of the largest NGL plants in Egypt regarding the plant processing capacity reaching about 1350 million standard cubic foot per day (MMSCFD).
The plant is designed to produce valuable liquids, namely propane, LPG or butane and condensate. In future, it is possible to retrofit the plant in order to produce also ethane.
Basically, the feed gas comes from the Egyptian Gas National Grid via two pipelines from PHARONIA and PETROBEL plants and the residue gas is sent back to the Gas Grid.

Port Said NGL Plant

The NGL plant feed gas is processed to give its 3 valuable products through the following main sections:

1) Pre treatment section

The feed gas is received in the Pre-treatment section before any operation to be sure of eliminating the main impurities and contaminants in the gas such as solids, liquids and particulates to prepare the gas for processing.
Solids are removed using a series of filters. Water vapor accompanied with feed gas is removed via a dehydration package, thus provides dry gas for processing in the cold section of the plant by lowering the dew point of the feed gas to the minimum limits. This process is important to avoid the formation of hydrates (complex solidified material) at very low cryogenic temperatures in the NGL extraction unit of the plant that could harmfully affect the performance of the plant and may lead to a shutdown.
Then at last comes the removal of mercury particulates present in the feed by nature from the ground wells of the gas, this is carried out via a unit using catalytic effect of special materials to lower mercury presence to the minimum allowable limits to avoid its corrosive effect on aluminum materials used in the NGL extraction unit.

Coalescer Filter Dehydration Package

Pretreatment-Unit-Co-leaser-Filter Pretreatment-Unit-Dehydration-Package

2) NGL Extraction section

NGL extraction section extracts more than 98% of the available propane and essentially 100% of the butanes and heavier components with a processing capacity of 1350 Million Standard Cubic Feet daily (MMSCFD) of the feed gas.
The extraction process is executed via cooling in two sections; the first section uses energy conservation concept through pre-cooling the feed by exchanging heat energy with cold streams (liquids and gasses) that need to be heated to reach the proper temperatures for the process at certain points.
The second section uses turbo-expander technology, where the pre-cooled gas is expanded to the lower pressure section of the process via a turbo-expander unit. This turbo-expander technology conserves the expansion energy (generated from expander) to derive a compressor (connected to same shaft of expander). This compressor is the 1st compression step for pushing the residue gases to the national gas grid.
The gas expansion leads to lowering temperature to the required cryogenic limits, achieving the cryogenic temperatures is important in the successive unit for extraction of the valuable liquid products.
Two successive towers are used for the product extraction, consisting of an absorber and a de-methanizer to have the top lean gasses to be fed back to the national grid and the valuable rich products from the bottom to be fractionated in the next section of the plant.
Future expansion is to be considered to recover ethane by installing a de-ethanizer in the plant.

3) Fractionation Area

Fractionation unit produces & controls the gas derivatives; propane, Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) and Debutanized Natural Gasoline (DNG) according to specifications, through fractionation towers (De-propanizer & De-butanizer). These two towers produce propane, LPG and DNG from hydrocarbon liquids which have been separated in the NGL extraction unit.

4) Storage & Loading Area

The plant includes three spherical tanks to store the produced LPG, with the possibility of storing propane in one of these spheres. In addition a bullet is provided for gathering the produced propane before being pumped to the main storage and refrigeration facilities at Damietta.
LPG is then loaded from NGL Plant in Port Said to the LPG bottling plants in Shata & Damietta through LPG pipeline, while DNG is stored in two bullets , then DNG is loaded to the refinery at Suez.
For the propane product; it has two ways of loading, either to Damietta facilities to be stored and exported or loaded to the petrochemicals factory next to UGDC port-said plant.

Energy conservation & new technologies applied

There were some new technologies applied for extracting the valuable products in the NGL plant like the turbo expander equipment accompanied with energy conservation concept, by using the expansion power into a mechanical movement of a shaft to compress another gas stream of to be pressurized. This turbo-expander uses an air hanged shaft generating zero friction so it is not lubricated and uses no bearings with zero friction losses. This is attributed to applying a theory of electromagnetic forces in equilibrium to apply this air hanged suspension with zero displacement during operation.
Gas turbines used in the plant (for recompression of the residue gases) use the energy conservation concept by exchanging the heat energy of the exhaust flue gasses to raise the temperature of the heating media of the plant.
Heat exchanging equipment named Cold Box used for pre-cooling of the feed gas has the advantage of very large heat exchanging surface area using the smallest possible volume of a heat exchanger which results in an easier layout for the plant.

The Port Said NGL Plant has been designed for the deep extraction of NGL cut from a mixed gas feed.

The plant is designed to produce valuable liquids, namely propane (C3), LPG or butane (C4) and condensate. In future, it will be possible to retrofit the plant in order to produce also ethane (C2).

Basically, the feed gas comes from the Egyptian Gas National Grid via two pipelines from PHARONIA and PETROBEL plants and the residue gas is sent back to the Gas Grid.

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