Liquefaction and impurity separation of oxygen-bearing coal-bed methane

Abstract

Coal-bed methane (CBM) is a type of clean energy. However, most oxygen-bearing CBM have not yet to be utilized due to limited techniques, and when utilized, the discharged gas leads to resource wastage and environment pollution. In this paper, a liquefaction process is proposed and designed for the specified oxygen-bearing CBM obtained from the Daqing Qingshen gas field. The distillation column is employed to separate the oxygen and nitrogen components present in the CBM. HYSYS software is adopted to simulate the process, and the results reveal that the energy consumption of the whole liquefaction process is low. Moreover, oxygen and nitrogen are nearly removed completely, achieving a high-purity liquefied natural gas product with a high methane recovery rate. The applicability and safety of the liquefaction process are also analyzed. The simulation results can offer references for the separation of the oxygen component from CBM.

Keywords

coal bed methane / oxygen-bearing / liquefaction / distillation