Chemicals natural gas

The principal technologies for sulfur control are acid gas removal and sulfur recovery. These technologies are well proven commercially and find use throughout the chemical, natural gas, and oil industries. Section 2 briefly discusses sulfur control technologies, and other EPRI reports discuss them in more detail (2). Thermal NO,j and CO emissions are controlled at the combustor. 

In the petroleum refining and natural gas treatment industries, mixtures of hydrocarbons are more often separated into their components or into narrower mixtures by chemical engineering operations that make use of phase equilibria between liquid and gas phases such as those mentioned below ... 

Sulfur also occurs in natural gas and petroleum crudes and must be removed from these products. Formerly this was done chemically, which wasted the sulfur new processes now permit recovery. Large amounts of sulfur are being recovered from Alberta gas fields. 

Chemists make compounds and strive to understand their reactions. My own interest lies in the chemistry of the compounds of the elements carbon and hydrogen, called hydrocarbons. These make up petroleum oil and natural gas and thus are in many ways essential for everyday life. They generate energy and heat our houses, fuel our cars and airplanes and are raw materials for most manmade materials ranging from plastics to pharmaceuticals. Many of the chemical reactions essential to hydrocarbons are catalyzed by acids and proceed through positive ion intermediates, called carbocations. 

Gas-phase adsorption is widely employed for the large-scale purification or bulk separation of air, natural gas, chemicals, and petrochemicals (Table 1). In these uses it is often a preferred alternative to the older unit operations of distillation and absorption. 

Drying. The single most common gas phase appHcation for TSA is drying. The natural gas, chemical, and cryogenics industries all use zeoHtes, siHca gel, and activated alurnina to dry streams. Adsorbents ate even found in mufflers. 

Using estimates of proven reserves and commitments to energy and chemical uses of gas resources, the net surplus of natural gas in a number of different countries that might be available for major fuel methanol projects has been determined. These are more than adequate to support methanol as a motor fuel. 

Coal is used ia industry both as a fuel and ia much lower volume as a source of chemicals. In this respect it is like petroleum and natural gas whose consumption also is heavily dominated by fuel use. Coal was once the principal feedstock for chemical production, but ia the 1950s it became more economical to obtain most industrial chemicals from petroleum and gas. Nevertheless, certain chemicals continue to be obtained from coal by traditional routes, and an interest in coal-based chemicals has been maintained in academic and industrial research laboratories. Much of the recent activity in coal conversion has been focused on production of synthetic fuels, but significant progress also has been made on use of coal as a chemical feedstock (see Coal CONVERSION processes). 

In the eady 1980s, the process was commercialized in New Zealand to convert offshore natural gas to 2200 m /day (14,000 barrels/day) gasoline. Since then some of the methanol has been diverted from fuel production to chemical-grade methanol production by a dding additional methanol refining capacity. 

Renewable carbon resources is a misnomer the earth s carbon is in a perpetual state of flux. Carbon is not consumed such that it is no longer available in any form. Reversible and irreversible chemical reactions occur in such a manner that the carbon cycle makes all forms of carbon, including fossil resources, renewable. It is simply a matter of time that makes one carbon from more renewable than another. If it is presumed that replacement does in fact occur, natural processes eventually will replenish depleted petroleum or natural gas deposits in several million years. Eixed carbon-containing materials that renew themselves often enough to make them continuously available in large quantities are needed to maintain and supplement energy suppHes biomass is a principal source of such carbon. 

The market penetration of synthetic fuels from biomass and wastes in the United States depends on several basic factors, eg, demand, price, performance, competitive feedstock uses, government incentives, whether estabUshed fuel is replaced by a chemically identical fuel or a different product, and cost and availabiUty of other fuels such as oil and natural gas. Detailed analyses have been performed to predict the market penetration of biomass energy well into the twenty-first century. A range of from 3 to about 21 EJ seems to characterize the results of most of these studies. 

There are many different routes to organic chemicals from biomass because of its high polysaccharide content and reactivity. The practical value of the conversion processes selected for commercial use with biomass will depend strongly on the availabiUty and price of the same chemicals produced from petroleum and natural gas. 

X MW in 1986, of the power produced in the same year. Biomass-fueled electric capacity and generation was 19.2% (4.9 x 10 MW) and 21.2% (23.7 X 10 MWh) respectively, of total nonutiUty capacity and generation. Biomass-fueled capacity experienced a 16% increase in 1986 over 1985, the same as natural gas, but it was not possible to determine the percentage of the total power production that was sold to the electric utiUties and used on-site. Total production should be substantially more than the excess sold to the electric utiUties. Overall, the chemical, paper, and lumber industries accounted for over one-half of the total nonutiUty capacity in 1986, and three states accounted for 45% of total nonutiUty generation, ie, Texas, 26% of total California, 12% of total and Louisiana, 7% of total. There were 2449 nonutiUty producers with operating faciUties in 1986, a 15.8% increase over 1985 75% capacity was intercoimected to electric utiUty systems. 

The basic chemical premise involved in making synthetic natural gas from heavier feedstocks is the addition of hydrogen to the oil ... 

J. A. Sofranko andj. C. Jubiu, "Natural Gas to Gasohne The ARCO GTG Process," paper presented at International Chemical Congress of Pacific Basin Societies, Honolulu, Hawaii, Dec. 1989. 

Chemical Use. Both natural gas and natural gas Hquids are used as feedstocks in the chemical industry. The largest chemical use of methane is through its reactions with steam to produce mixtures of carbon monoxide and hydrogen (qv). This overall endothermic reaction is represented as... 

Natural gas Hquids represent a significant source of feedstocks for the production of important chemical building blocks that form the basis for many commercial and iadustrial products. Ethyleae (qv) is produced by steam-crackiag the ethane and propane fractions obtained from natural gas, and the butane fraction can be catalyticaHy dehydrogenated to yield 1,3-butadiene, a compound used ia the preparatioa of many polymers (see Butadiene). The / -butane fractioa can also be used as a feedstock ia the manufacture of MTBE. 

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