Dehydration of natural gas

using solid desiccants

By P. Gandhidasan *, Abdulghani A. Al-Farayedhi, Ali A. Al-Mubarak
Why dehydration of natural gas?
● Reduces the potential for corrosion
● Reduces hydrate formation
● Reduces freezing in the pipeline
● It stops sluggish flow conditions that may be caused by condensation of water
vapor in natural gas.
● Water is also removed to meet a water dew point requirement of a sales gas
contract specification range from 32.8 to 117 kg/106 std m3.
1.Liquid desiccant dehydrator
● There are numbers of liquids that can be used to absorb water from natural
gases such as calcium chloride,lithium chloride, and glycols.
● Glycols have proved to be the most effective liquid desiccants.
● They have high hygroscopicity, low vapor pressure, high boiling points and
low solubility in and of natural gas.
● operating problems with glycol dehydrators.

Suspended foreign matter, such as dirt, scale and iron oxide, may contaminate
glycol solutions. Also, overheating of the solutions may produce both low and high
boiling decomposition products
Solid desiccant dehydrator
● Solid desiccant dehydration is an adsorption process
● Adsorption increases with pressure increase and decreases with a
temperature increase
Equipment description
● The solid lines represent the gas being dried, while the dashed lines
represent the regeneration gas flow.
● Usually adsorption flow is from top to bottom to prevent lifting of the bed by
extreme gas velocities and channeling.
● Regeneration flow is normally countercurrent to adsorption flow to ensure
complete regeneration of the bottom of the bed.
● The bed should be switched to regeneration just before the water content of
outlet gas reaches an unacceptable level.
Mechanism of water adsorption
● As the wet inlet gas flows downward through the tower on the adsorption
cycle, all of the adsorbable gas components are adsorbed at different rates.
● The water vapor is directly adsorbed in top layers of the bed. Dry
hydrocarbons gas components (propane, butane) passing on down through
the bed are also adsorbed, with the heavier components displacing the lighter
components as the cycle proceeds.
● Pore size of silica gel has the broadest range.Therefore, it can adsorb larger
molecules in addition to water.
● After the process has proceeded for a very short period of time, a series of
adsorption zones will form and move down through the desiccant bed. These
zones represent the length of tower involved in the adsorption of any
component.
● As the upper layers of desiccant become saturated with water, the lower
layers begin to see wet gas and begin adsorbing the water vapor, displacing
the previously adsorbed hydrocarbon components. When the bed is saturated
with water vapor, the tower must be switched from adsorption cycle to
regeneration cycle before the bed has become completely saturated with
water.