The depletion of conventional light crude oil deposits and the growing demand for light-colored, low-sulfur petroleum products have sparked an interest in stable gas condensate. Gas condensate is obtained as a by-product of natural gas production. Sometimes, it is also referred to as “natural gasoline”, because it contains hydrocarbons within the boiling range of gasoline. A small amount of gas condensate is added to crude oil before distillation, while the rest is exported in its crude state.
Applications of Stable Gas Condensate
Stable gas condensate can be converted into various petroleum products, such as gasoline, aircraft fuel, petrochemicals, including ethylene and propene for the plastics industry. Compared to crude oil refining, gas condensate processing involves less labor-intensive conversion and refining, so its investment cost is lower than the investment cost of crude oil refining.
There are hundreds of natural gas fields in the world, and each of those has its unique composition of gas condensate. Therefore, the gas condensate color varies from clear to various shades of yellow. The color intensity is determined by the content of crude oil impurities. In order to obtain gas condensate of the composition that would be stable and suitable for use, as well as have a marketable appearance, it is cleared of impurities and polished.
GlobeCore Technology for Gas Condensate Polishing
For gas condensate polishing, GlobeCore has developed a special technology that is implemented in CMM-R plants. The basic idea of gas condensate polishing deals with running it through adsorbent-filled columns. During this process, contaminants and heavy oil droplets are retained by the sorbent, which allows the output to be a clear, marketable product suitable, in particular, for further processing.
Stable gas condensate of commercial quality and marketable appearance can then be used, for example, to upgrade the quality of gasoline. Stable gas condensate contains hydrocarbons that can be added to gasoline to improve its octane rating.
The GlobeCore technology is completely waste-free; the sorbent used for gas condensate polishing is reactivated directly within the CMM-R plants; thus, it requires no disposal and can be used 300–500 times, and in some cases — even up to 1,000 times.