Conventional wisdom holds that small natural gas liquefaction plants (producing less than 100,000 gallons per day of LNG) cannot be built and operated economically. This is primarily due to high capital and maintenance costs typically associated with this type plant.
Thus, the economies of scale have historically led to the installation of single, large scale LNG liquefaction plants that can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and which usually require long haul transportation of the product to the end-user.
S-Con and BDL Fuels have developed a new modular plant design for LNG production of 10,000 to 250,000 gallons per day that can handle gas compositions ranging from pure methane to gas containing 13 GPM of heavy hydrocarbon and 25% nitrogen.
The plants are designed to pre-treat the gas, recover essentially 100 percent of the ethane (C2) and heavier hydrocarbon components into a Y-Grade quality NGL product and liquefy the methane product into LNG, as well as reject any excess nitrogen (N2) that might be contained in the inlet gas stream.
In its simplest form, feed for the plant is pipeline quality gas. However, with the new SUPERCOOL process, the plant is also designed to process raw, untreated gas, recovering essentially 100% of the contained NGL, generating vehicular-grade LNG and rejecting N2 to pipeline or LNG specifications.