Eindhoven: cleaning contaminated gas streams

Licensing opportunity

Ralph van Wissen, a researcher at the Eindhoven University of Technology, has applied centrifuge technology to clean up contaminated natural gas reserves, making it possible to exploit reservoirs that are currently uneconomic. The work has received backing from the oil company Shell, which intends to further develop the technology.

It is estimated that up to 16 per cent of natural gas reserves and not exploited because they contain levels of contamination that are too costly to remove with existing methods.

Van Wissen has developed a cleaning technique based on the centrifugal separation of gases, and has built a prototype that can be scaled up to be used in producing natural gas.

Gas reserves that are unrecoverable economically when contaminated with carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulphide. Current cleaning processes using selective absorption techniques and membrane technology are of limited use. If the concentration of CO2 and H2S is more than 15 per cent, more energy is expended in these processes than is gained in the natural gas.

With the new technique developed by van Wissen it is possible to clean highly contaminated natural gas, containing 15 per cent to 70 per cent CO2 and H2S, turning it into a relatively clean gas mixture with only 5 per cent contamination. Only a small percentage of energy is lost in the process, and conventional cleaning techniques can then be used without much extra cost or energy expenditure to further purify this mixture.

The prototype built by van Wissen can process a gas stream of 60 cubic metres an hour, and is scalable.