The choices made during FEED on a gas processing facility will determine operational cost, reliability, and flexibility for decades. Here are the five that matter most.
Front-End Decisions Have Long Tails
Gas processing plants are long-lived assets. A facility designed today may operate for 30 to 40 years. The engineering decisions made during FEED and detailed design establish the operational cost structure, reliability profile, and operational flexibility of that asset for its entire life. Getting them right matters.
1. Inlet Separation and Slug Handling
Underestimating slug volume and frequency is one of the most common and costly early design errors in gas processing. Production profiles change. Well counts increase. Gathering system geometry changes over time. A slug catcher sized tightly for today’s production rates may be grossly undersized in year five.
Design to handle realistic worst-case slugging scenarios, not just steady-state production. The incremental cost of a properly sized inlet system is a fraction of the operational disruption caused by an undersized one.
2. Compression Strategy
The choice between centralized compression and distributed compression has long-term implications for operating cost, reliability, and operational flexibility. Centralized compression is typically lower in capital cost but creates single-point-of-failure risk. Distributed compression adds complexity but improves uptime.
Pelican evaluates compression architecture as part of every processing facility FEED, modeling multiple scenarios against projected production profiles before recommending an approach.
3. Heat Integration
Gas processing plants have significant heat integration opportunities between inlet cooling, lean oil chilling, reboiler duty, and export gas heating. Plants designed without deliberate heat integration analysis leave meaningful energy cost on the table for the life of the facility.
4. Chemical Injection Philosophy
Corrosion inhibitor, hydrate inhibitor, and antifoam injection systems are often designed as afterthoughts. The result is systems that are difficult to operate, unreliable, and inadequately monitored. A thoughtful chemical injection design with appropriate flow measurement, injection point placement, and control logic is worth the engineering investment.
5. Instrumentation Philosophy and Future SCADA Integration
A processing facility that cannot be effectively monitored and controlled remotely is a facilities operations liability. The instrumentation philosophy established in FEED determines the operational visibility available to the control room and the maintainability of the system over its life. Design for the operations team, not just for commissioning.
These are the kinds of FEED-phase decisions that Pelican’s midstream engineering team focuses on. Contact us to discuss your next midstream project.