Term 252

Hybrid Flare Gas Recovery System

Project Type: Self-Initiated

Project Description

Associated gas produced with crude oil is often underutilized or flared at upstream facilities, which wastes energy and increases emissions, while most commercial recovery systems are large, expensive, and designed for centralized plants rather than small field locations. This project will develop a design for a modular, skid mounted system that recovers associated gas taken downstream of primary oil–gas separation and prepares it for useful energy production on-site. The proposed process will include inlet liquid removal, compression with cooling, and downstream separation to protect equipment and stabilize gas conditions, followed by a gas treatment step to meet typical fuel-gas requirements; the treated hydrocarbon-rich stream will then be used as fuel in a combustion unit with heat recovery, with the main utilization case focused on driving an absorption chiller to provide cooling at the site. Due to university safety limits, the work will rely on simulation and safe demonstrations rather than testing with real hydrocarbons: the full process will be modeled in Aspen HYSYS, and a physical prototype will be built to visualize the skid layout and to test selected components (such as piping, cooling hardware, and compressor-related behavior) using safe gases. The outcome will be a defensible conceptual design package that defines system boundaries, process streams, and disposal routes, key equipment roles, and expected performance under variable inlet conditions.