Design and analysis of a small-scale natural gas liquefaction process adopting single nitrogen expansion with carbon dioxide pre-cooling

With the growth of energy consumption and environmental protection concerns, it is of enormous economic and environmental values for the development of stranded gas. As a means for exploitation and transportation of stranded gas to market, a novel small-scale liquefaction process adopting single nitrogen expansion with carbon dioxide pre-cooling is put up with in this paper. Taking unit energy consumption as the target function, Aspen HYSYS is employed to simulate and optimize the process to achieve the liquefaction rate of 0.77 with unit energy consumption of 9.90 kW/kmol/h. Furthermore, the adaptability of this process under different pressure, temperature and compositions of feed gas is studied. Based on the optimization results, the exergy losses of main equipment in the process are evaluated and analyzed in details. With compact device, safety operation, simple capability, this liquefaction process proves to be suitable for the development of small gas reserves, satellite distribution fields of gas or coalbed methane fields.