Case Studies of SMR Liquefaction for FLNG Applications

Recently, global carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere have reached a historically high level, and the marine sector's emission is one of the contributions. The current effort to change the alternative energy source of LNG (liquified natural gas) fuel is one of the cleanest fossil fuels due to lower carbon emissions. The world's energy needs for LNG are overgrowing as well, The LNG marine industry forecasts that the increasing demand for FLNG (floating liquefied natural gas) vessels will accelerate the research on the system process analysis and optimisation of the liquefaction system. The rapid growth in equipment and processes of FLNG development is the response to weight and space limits challenges. This paper proposed a small-scale liquefaction process with a refrigerant cycle, a single mixed refrigerant SMR-PRICO process as an example, using sensitivity analyses of the parameter to get optimisation. In addition, to study the influence of different process parameters on the solution of the optimisation problem, the parameters studied include natural gas supply at different pressure. The case study model is based on a process model presented by Black and Veatch developed a more straightforward SMR process called the PRICO process (Aspelund et al. 2010; Xu et al. 2013). The study models were simulated with process parameters for the base case in Table 1 (Venkatarathnam in Cryogenic mixed refrigerant processes, Springer).