The current oil and gas market context is characterized by high uncertainties and a subsequent reduction in new investments. This leads to an ever-increasing attention towards more efficient exploitation of resources and production processes. This scenario together with the industrial evolution of upstream plats towards a massive digitalization highlight the need of an advanced and flexible monitoring platform, that similarly to a digital twin, is able to integrate critical information and operator's knowledge in order to support and optimize asset management and decision making processes. This paper describes how the digitalization of Oil&Gas Asset helps the Production Engineers to optimize and troubleshoot the Acid Gas Enrichment Unit.
The very first step was the development and creation of an on-line, real time and dynamic monitoring Digital Oilfield Platform. This platform replicate both the process flow diagram with real time process parameter and both the chemical analysis, allowing the Production Engineers to trend and compare all the needed data. The platform helps to discover hidden troubles and possible optimization. This paper will discuss about a real case of improvement on the absorption efficiency of sulphur components and the slippage of CO2 in the Acid Gas Enrichment Unit (AGEU).
Optimizing the AGEU is fundamental to reduce the environmental impact of the Oil&Gas plant, since it absorbs the sulphur gas component and feed them to the Claus system to convert the H2S in liquid sulphur, a valuable product. A loss in absorption efficiency means that the system will release more sulphur component in the atmosphere, after a complete oxidation in SO2.
The digitalization of the physical asset was an essential step to suddenly detect any performance decreasing and to fast restore or find the best condition. Moreover, it is and indispensable tool to track any process parameter and configuration change to perform a solid test to improve a new and better solution.
In the various section of this paper we will see all the step done to optimize the AGEU and how they were monitored in the Digital Oilfield Platform, showing step by step the achieved results. At the end of the troubleshooting and optimization it was achieved a 30% improvement in H2S concentration from the AGEU towards the next process section and a 56% reduction in H2S concentration towards the atmosphere.
