Baku, Azerbaijan, Apr. 25
By Fatih Karimov - Trend:
Iran will launch mercaptan removal units in South Pars gas field in a bid to increase the quality of its gas condensate, Mansour Bazmi, an official with Iran's Research Institute of Petroleum Industry (RIPI), said.
Iran is facing problems in marketing the condensate of the South Pars gas field due to its low quality, and huge amount of the extracted condensate is stored, Bazmi, who heads the RIPI's Downstream Industries Campus, said, IRNA news agency reported Apr. 25.
Launching the mercaptan removal units in the field is on the agenda, Bazmi said, adding the projects will be implemented as pilot in Phases 2 and 3 of South Pars gas field.
Sulfur compounds and mercaptans in hydrocarbon and petroleum cuts lead to environmental pollution and corrosion problems in pipelines and storage tanks. So it is necessary to decrease sulfur and mercaptans concentrations in hydrocarbon cuts to international standard levels in petroleum industries.
Bazmi further said that the project will be implemented by a newly established consortium. He further said that the mercaptan removal process of almost 80,000 barrels of gas condensates will be launched.
South Pars, located in southern region, is divided into 24 development phases, and contains 40 trillion cubic meters of natural gas.
It covers an area of 9,700 square kilometers, 3,700 square kilometers of which are in Iran's territorial waters in the Persian Gulf. The remaining 6,000 square kilometers are situated in Qatar's territorial waters.
The Islamic Republic is producing over 420 million cubic meters per day (mcm/d) of gas from South Pars, while the production level is projected to surpass 700 mcm/d by late 2018.
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