Air Quality Contol Inititaves

The intent of this paper is to share the successful operational story in controlling air quality at Saudi Aramco, Uthmaniyah Gas Plant energy efficiency program. Obligation with environmental regulations becomes, nowadays a challenge to the industry fields. UGP was committed to comply with the government and Saudi Aramco environmental standards by implementing several ideas to enhance the air quality. The first idea is Wet Hydrocarbon Recovery System which eliminates the continuous use of burn pit for Wet HC from eth blow down system and re-injects back into the HC crude lines. Beside this modification will allow UGP to comply with environmental regulations by eliminating the continuous flaring of Wet HC, it will reserve the life time of the burn pits and protect the ground water aquifer from contaminations. The second idea is upgrading the Sulfur units from CLAUS process to SUPERCLAUS process to achieve 98.7 % of sulfur recovery and reduce SO2 emissions by installing new condenser with coalser and changing the type of converters’ catalysts. All of these modifications resulted in decreasing the SO2 emissions by 25 %. The third idea is Flare Gas Recovery System which the system will recover the flare gases from the flare headers and then compressed the gas to 260 psig for feeding the plant low pressure sour gas header. The ultimate goal of this idea is to avoid visible smoke and flame from flaring system and comply with environmental regulations. The system is very attractive not only reducing flares’ emissions but also it would recover the valuable gases being wasted to the flare stack. This paper discusses, in details, all ideas objectives, processes and benefits.