Smart design for high CO2 removal for natural gas production

G. Bowerbank, Shell Global Solutions, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Recent oil and gas discoveries provide an increasing outlook for gas fields containing CO2 content of 10 mol% to as high as 70 mol% of CO2. The increasing amount of CO2 content in newly discovered gas fields requires smart designs to minimize capital and operational expenditures (CAPEX and OPEX) while adhering to emissions requirements. Amines and membranes are commercially available technologies for CO2 removal. However, membranes alone can only perform bulk CO2 removal and cannot achieve low CO2 specifications (and certainly not the deep CO2 removal needed for LNG specifications). Therefore, membranes will often require an