Mahdi Ashkanani - Kuwait Oil Company
Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) produces the crude associated rich gas after separation process to the refineries at the Kuwait National Petroleum Company (KNPC). The KNPC uses the Acid Gas Removal Plants (AGRP) to extract the sulfur contents in the received gas from KOC. When the AGRP’s are not available due to planed or unplanned shutdowns, it was found that a Gas Sweetening Facility (GSF) is a solution to be built at KOC boundaries to support the KNPC in this case.
The primary purpose of the Gas Sweetening Facility (GSF) plant is to take out the sour gas (acid gas) components (H2S and CO2) of the associated gas to produce sweet and dry product gas stream for delivery to the KOC pipeline. The aim of this project is to reduce flaring of the gas and condensates in the KOC and it is considered to be one of the major milestones in achieving KOC’s objective of zero flaring.
The GSF at KOC was built and commissioned in 2010 as the first of its kind “Company owned, pre-engineered, modular based integrated Sour Gas Sweetening Facility”. The aim of this facility is to meet anticipated sour gas treating requirement of KNPC as an end-user and to sustain business continuation besides reducing envisaged losses of Sour Rich Gas with its associated Condensate & minimizing “Sour Crude Oil” differed production during KNPC AGRPs outage.
The KOC has started an additional New Gas Sweetening Facility (NGSF) project with a Sulfur Recovery Unit (SRU) in order to assure sustained oil & associated gas production in a safe operational envelope and to prevent potential revenue losses especially during envisaged KNPC AGRP’s Revamp & Retirement as well as ending of Existing GSF contract (2017-2020). Moreover, Flaring of gas shall be restricted/controlled solely on emergency events there by corporate strategic objective of “Realizing the Potential of Gas” to be reached.