Chandrasekar Srinivasakannan
The Petroleum Institute, UAE
Title: Recent developments in mercury removal technologies in gas processsing
Biography
Biography: Chandrasekar Srinivasakannan
Abstract
Presence of mercury in the natural gas and crude oil is of serious environmental, health and processing concern to gas processing as well as refining industries. The concentration of mercury in the gas could vary from nano to micro grams depending on the location on the gas wells. Mercury could be present in elemental, organic or inorganic forms, all which are of serious concern as it would seriously enhance the corrossion rate of the aluminium exchangers leading to catastropic failiure. Hence mercury removal is one of the separation processess in gas and crude processing involving differnt kinds of adsorbents. These separation process are normally coupled with moisture removal operations of the gas processing utilizing carbon based adsorbents either with regeneral type utilizing silver impregnated carbons or non regenerable type involving sulfur, iodide, bromide etc. The most popular and cheaper being the sulfur loaded carbons, however the performance and the cost of which is found to vary in orders of magnitude depending upon its performance. A relative comparison of the various the forms of popularly avaialble and laboratory developed carbons indicate the importance of efficient incorporation of the sulfur in the carbon matrix rather than the high amounts of sulfur being loaded. Even the best of materials available have utilized far less amouts of sulfur for binding with mercury as compared to the amount of sulfur present in the material. The recent developments include sulfonated carbons with relatively much higher mercury removal capacity although they had relatively low surface area and sulfur content as compared with the popularly utilized UOP catalyst in the industry. The second generation development with better performance is reported with metal sulfide impregated carbon material which overcome some of the disadvantages of sulfur impregnated carbons. The recent focus on these lines of development concentrate on utilization of ionic and deep utectic solvents in carbon matrix with compatively better performances.