Flue Gas from Fire Drive is a byproduct of the Fire Drive oil recovery technology, which mainly consists of N
2 and CO
2, and contains trace amounts of alkanes, H
2S, and O
2[
1]. Its components have a certain singularity, generally not directly discharged into the atmosphere, can be used to re-injection oil reservoir or collection and transportation after desulfurization discharge[
2,
3]. Because the exhaust gas after desulfurization contains abundant CO
2 resources, it is obviously not in line with the purpose of national energy conservation and emission reduction. In order to achieve the dual-carbon goal and reduce carbon emissions, oil and gas enterprises need to recycle the exhaust gas of fire drive, so it is necessary to carry out carbon recovery before the exhaust gas desulfurization[
4]. For this type of natural gas, the combined decarburization process of membrane separation and alcohol amine is generally adopted in China, but this process has some disadvantages such as high renewable energy consumption and large loss of chemical reagents[
5]. For the purpose of reducing carbon emissions, it is not necessary to completely remove CO
2, but only to enrich CO
2 to meet the requirements of energy conservation and emission reduction of fire-flooding exhaust.
Capture of CO
2 from flue gases produced by the combustion of fossil fuels and biomass in air is referred to as post-combustion capture[
6]. Scholes et al. [
7] considers the potential for either H2- or CO2-selective membranes in an integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) process. Xu et al. [
8] explored a multicomponent gas separation process using spiral-wound membrane modules to optimize its membrane area and energy consumption. Zhao et al. [
9] describes a detailed parametric study for multi-stage membrane systems used in a coal-fired power plant. Zhang et al. [
10] applied a systematic method that integrates process simulation, capture cost estimation, and exergy analysis to evaluate a gas separation membrane process for post-combustion carbon capture in a coal power plant. Bounaceur et al. [
11] perform a systematic analysis of the separation performances and associated energy cost of a single-stage membrane module. Hussain et al. [
12] evaluate the viability of a two-stage process using combined nitrogen (N
2)-selective and carbon dioxide (CO
2)-selective membranes for post-combustion CO
2 capture. Li et al. [
13] first focus on the requirements for CO
2 separation membrane, and then outline the existing competitive materials, promising preparation methods and process to achieve desirable CO
2 selectivity and permeability. In this study, Ren et al. [
14] considered both CO
2-selective and N
2-selective membranes and relevant issues regarding the CO
2-selective membrane, such as pressure ratio, attainability, and multistage configuration, are studied and extended to the N
2-selective membrane. Gkotsis et al. [
15] presented the state of the art of membrane-based technologies for CO
2 capture from flue gases. Lee et al. [
16] proposed and evaluated two alternative CO
2 liquefaction processes. These alternative processes use multistage expansion and multistream heat exchangers to lower the input stream temperature for the compressor. Mehrpooya et al. [
17] proposed a novel integrated process of liquefied natural gas production, oxy-fuel electrical power generation cycle and cryogenic carbon dioxide capture and liquefaction and investigated by chemical process simulators. a novel purification and liquefaction integrated structure includes a biogas upgrading process by cryogenic separation and amine scrubbing methods and a biomethane liquefaction cycle based on the mixed fluid cascade[
18]. Xin et al. [
19] proposed a new process scheme of compressed liquefaction of CO
2 in the CCUS project by using liquid natural gas (LNG) cold energy through CO
2 pipeline transportation to save energy and reduce consumption. For liquid carbon dioxide energy storage (LCES) technology, CO
2 is stored as liquid phase in both HP and LP sides of the system, which has high energy storage density and strong operation stability[
20]. Yang et al. [
21] do Energy and cost analysis of the preprocessing for carbon capture and storage transportation such as supercritical compression and liquefaction using chemical simulation model.
Therefore, CO
2 can be captured by membrane separation method, and the captured CO
2 can be liquefied by mixed coolant liquefaction and rectification process to obtain food-grade liquid carbon dioxide[
22]. Based on the above analysis, this paper adopts a relatively mature mixed refrigerant liquefaction process and introduces a membrane separation process to design a CO
2 recovery process for fire-flooding exhaust[
23], and obtains food-grade liquid CO
2 that meets the purity requirements. At the same time, the HYSYS and MATLAB hybrid simulation platform was established to simulate and optimize the process.
1. Design of CO2 Recovery Process of Fire-Flooding Exhaust
The components of fire-flooding exhaust are shown in
Table 1.
As shown in
Figure 1, the recycling process consists of three parts:
- (1)
Secondary membrane separation
Membrane separation method has the advantages of no phase change, high separation efficiency, compact equipment and high reliability, which greatly simplifies the decarbonization process[
24]. The method has been widely used at home and abroad, and the membrane separation of acetate fiber membrane is the most widely used and economical. As shown in
Figure 2, the feed gas was pressurized to 2-3 MPa to enter the primary membrane separation unit, and CO
2 was enriched on the permeable side through the polymer membrane. The retained gas is mainly N
2, which re-enters the secondary membrane separation unit, and a small amount of CO
2 is enriched on the permeable side. The permeable side CO
2 rich flow is introduced into the cold box for pre-cooling liquefaction.
- (2)
Mixed refrigerant refrigeration cycle
After the mixed refrigerant is compressed at three stages and cooled by water cooler, it is throttled by throttle valve and the CO2 rich flow is liquefied in the cold box. The low pressure refrigerant after gasification returns to the entrance of the primary compressor and continues to cycle refrigeration.
- (3)
CO2 distillation and purification
The liquefied CO2 rich flow is introduced into the rectification column, and the content of oxygen and hydrogen sulfide at the bottom of the column is controlled to obtain high purity food-grade liquid CO2, which is entered into the CO2 finished product storage tank. The temperature of the top of the tower is controlled to avoid the ice blockage of CO2, and a small amount of tail gas mixture generated at the top of the tower is discharged.
According to the above process, the CO
2 recovery process shown in
Figure 1 was established based on HYSYS software. However, Aspen HYSYS does not have a built-in gas penetration unit module. For this purpose, a "Membrane" membrane separation expansion module is used. This module has been used by foreign scholars to separate CO
2 from CH
4/CO
2 mixture and flue gas[
25,
26,
27].
2. Analysis of Parameters of Liquefaction Process
2.1. Initial Parameter Setting and Product Requirements
Table 1 components are applied, and other parameters are set in
Table 2.
2.2. Process Parameters and Performance Specifications
The main indicators to measure the performance of the process are specific power consumption and recovery rate. This article defines the specific power consumption of the process:
CO
2 recovery rate:
where,
WMR,C,
WEG,C are the refrigerant compression work, and the compression work before fire-flooding exhaust film separation, kW respectively; W
Tower is the heat consumption of rectification tower, kW;
MEG is the mass flow rate of fire exhaust gas, kg/h;
MCO2 of EG is the mass flow of CO2 in the exhaust gas of fire flooding, kg/h;
MCO2 of Venting is the mass flow of CO2 in the vented air, kg/h;
MCO2 is the mass flow rate of liquid CO2, kg/h;
w is the specific power consumption, kW∙h/kg.
According to Chapter 1 and 2,
Table 3 gives the simulation results of key parameters of the process under basic cases.
At this time, the minimum heat transfer temperature difference of LNG-100 in the process is 3.446 ℃, the specific power consumption of the process is 2.818 kW∙h/kg, and the CO2 recovery rate is 69.02%.
3. Process Optimization
3.1. Objective Functions and Constraints
The specific power consumption of the process is taken as the objective function, the minimum heat exchange temperature difference of the heat exchanger is not less than 3 ° C, the gas phase fraction of the low-pressure refrigerant returned to the primary compressor is equal to 1[
34], the pressure ratio is not greater than 3, and the purity of liquid CO
2 meets
Table 1 as the constraint conditions, and the optimization variables include the refrigerant flow rate, the outlet pressure of the refrigerant compressor and the temperature after throttling. In order to improve optimization efficiency and reduce the number of optimization variables, only the three-stage compression outlet pressure of mixed refrigerant
χ is considered as the optimization variable of the compressor outlet pressure (refrigerant high pressure), while the outlet pressure of other stages is not regarded as an independent optimization variable, which is calculated by
χ according to the optimal theory of proportional compression [
35]. The final objective function and constraints are shown in Equation (7) and (8).
where,
X is the independent variable matrix. Combined with the liquefaction process, it includes refrigerant CH
4 flow rate
qC1, refrigerant C
2H
6 flow rate
qC2, refrigerant C
3H
8 flow rate
qC3, refrigerant N
2 flow rate
qN2, three-stage compression outlet pressure of mixed refrigerant
χ, and temperature
μ after throttling of mixed refrigerant.
3.2. Optimization Process
The steady-state optimizer of HYSYS can optimize the process, but for the process with more variables, the optimization results often do not meet the constraints, so the optimization process is transferred to MATLAB[
36]. By creating ActiveXcom server, the effective information exchange between HYSYS and Matlab programs can be realized. There are two advantages to using MATLAB for process optimization: on the one hand, it can easily satisfy constraints and allow custom optimization routines; On the other hand, detailed output can be displayed during the optimization process. In this study, sequential quadratic programming algorithm (SQP) is used to solve min f(X) and determine the optimal solution of variables. The detailed optimization process is shown in
Figure 3, and the iterative process of SQP algorithm is shown in
Figure 4.
3.3. Results and Analysis
On the basis of MATLAB & HYSYS hybrid simulation platform, SQP optimization algorithm is used to optimize the specific power consumption of the liquefaction process, and the optimal solutions of its objective function and variables are shown in
Table 4. The specific power consumption is reduced to 2.287 kW∙h/kg, which is 18.8% lower than before optimization.
4. Process Adaptability Analysis
According to the current market situation, the price of food-grade liquid CO
2 is about 12 yuan/kg, then the total sales of the whole process product
S is:
According to the calculation, corresponding to 1000 kg/h of feed gas, the total sales of products under optimized conditions is S=2086.8 yuan/h. Based on the initial component and ignoring other trace components, the N2 / CO2 component ratio in the fire-flooding exhaust is changed under the condition that the minimum heat exchange temperature difference of the heat exchanger is 2-4 ℃ (to ensure a high heat exchange efficiency) to analyze the adaptability of optimization conditions. The results show that under the condition of constant raw gas flow, with the increase of CO2 content in fire-flooding exhaust, the total sales of the product increases, the specific power consumption of the process decreases, and the CO2 recovery rate increases, which means that the ability of the process to recover CO2 is getting higher and higher.
5. Conclusions
In this paper, a process flow of CO2 recovery from fire-flooding exhaust is designed, and HYSYS software is used to simulate the process. Meanwhile, HYSYS & MATLAB hybrid simulation platform is established, and SQP algorithm is used to optimize the process. Finally, the adaptability of optimization conditions is analyzed, and the following conclusions are drawn:
- (1)
The designed CO2 recovery process of fire-flooding exhaust can achieve the preparation of food-grade liquid CO2. HYSYS process simulation shows that the CO2 recovery rate is 69.02% under the basic case condition. After the optimization, the specific power consumption of the liquefaction process is reduced to 2.287 kW∙h/kg, which is 18.8% lower than before the optimization.
- (2)
For a flow rate of 1000 kg/h, the total sales of products under optimized conditions under the components in
Table 1 is
S=2086.8 yuan/h. Under the conditions of N
2 / CO
2 components in
Table 6, with the increase of CO
2 content in the exhaust gas, the total sales volume of the product increases, the specific power consumption of the process decreases, and the CO
2 recovery rate increases, that is, the ability of the process to recover CO
2 becomes higher and higher.
- (3)
The process adopts membrane separation and enrichment of CO2, avoids complex chemical decarbonization process, reduces the initial investment of equipment and long-term operating costs, makes full use of carbon resources in fire-flooding exhaust, and achieves the dual carbon goal of energy saving and emission reduction.
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