Analysis of an optimum method for power generation using flare gas from oil refinery plants

Today the world is facing global warming as one of its main issues, this is mainly caused by a rise in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere. Flaring is one of the major causes of the increase in greenhouse gases, 145 billion cubic meters of natural gas was flared in 2018. Indonesia being an archipelago nation and located near the equator suffers greatly from these global warming impacts. The impacts include environmental degradation, health implications and economic effects. This study is intended to develop a power plant configuration that can be adopted at an already existing plant to use flare gas as a complementary fuel. The energy of the flare gas will be converted into mechanical energy through thermal power plant instead of being vented as presently. Two possible plant configurations were developed and simulated using Thermo-flow and the results were compared. Both configurations employ the combined cycle concept, where a gas turbine is coupled with a steam turbine. The main difference between the two configurations is that configuration 1 uses a Heat Recovery Steam Generator whilst the second configuration uses common Heat Exchangers in-between the gas turbine and the Rankine cycle. The results show that configuration 1 would generate a net power of 40.948MW whilst configuration 2 would generate 32.924MW.Today the world is facing global warming as one of its main issues, this is mainly caused by a rise in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere. Flaring is one of the major causes of the increase in greenhouse gases, 145 billion cubic meters of natural gas was flared in 2018. Indonesia being an archipelago nation and located near the equator suffers greatly from these global warming impacts. The impacts include environmental degradation, health implications and economic effects. This study is intended to develop a power plant configuration that can be adopted at an already existing plant to use flare gas as a complementary fuel. The energy of the flare gas will be converted into mechanical energy through thermal power plant instead of being vented as presently. Two possible plant configurations were developed and simulated using Thermo-flow and the results were compared. Both configurations employ the combined cycle concept, where a gas turbine is coupled with a steam turb...