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Electric Motor Drive for Natural Gas Compression in Pipeline: Techno-economic Analysis

Abstract

The transportation of natural gas requires more compressors than any other sector of the oil and gas market due to the long distances the gas must travel between gathering, processing and distribution sites. Electric drive is one of the major prime movers used for these compressor stations in order to maintain the gas flow and to deliver at a set pressure. To maintain a minimum transportation cost, a techno-economic module which will guide the drive and pipe selection is important. This paper presents a techno-economic tool which can be used to rapidly assess the profitability or otherwise of a natural gas pipeline project employing an electric motor drive as a prime mover. The technoeconomic tool is made of modules which are integrated together by a FORTRAN code called wrapper. This controls the running of each of the modules. The modules which make up the techno-economic tool are pipeline and compressor station module, electric motor and economic modules. As a case study for this analysis, a 24 inch 512km pipeline with a natural gas throughput of 4.54 million cubic meters per day (160.3 MMscfd) requiring a drive power of 34 MW was employed. From the results and analysis, for a throughput of 0.5 Mm3/day, the transportation cost is $0127, $0.192 and $0.249 for pipe sizes of 304.8 mm, 609.6 mm and 1219.2 mm respectively. The results presented also shows that the economic pipe size for a 4.5 million cubic meter per day of natural gas is 609.6 mm (NPS 24) with transportation cost of $0.043 which is equivalent to $1.13 per GJ.

A. Nasir, P. Pilidis, S. Ogaji, H. T. Abdulkarim, A. El-Suleiman

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