Surfactant contaminants in feed gas streams to amine units—The phantom foaming agent

Contamination in feed gas streams to processing plants is a leading cause of lost revenue, upsets and low throughput. More detailed testing shows that surfactants in the gas stream are among the most damaging contaminants affecting the process. Surfactants pose a number of challenges, such as foaming and emulsification. In the feed gas, surfactants may be the predominant cause of amine foaming leading to high H2S in the treated gas and amine solvent losses. Surface active contaminants in gas streams should be sampled, analyzed and removed to enable processing plants to run in a stable manner. Here, several cases are discussed where inlet gas sampling revealed the presence of surfactants dir