Power supply and water supply are always vital to the operation of cryogenic air separation units (ASU) to create the cryogenic conditions, or simply the ‘coldness’. The coldness created is considered a source of energy storage and often called ‘cold energy’.
Gas majors are always striving for improvements in the operation to reduce the consumption of these two resources, as power cost keeps escalating and water supply is reported to be growing more restricted in the future. Therefore, any source of cold energy to help the operation is a valuable resource.
Since LNG is also produced by cooling natural gas to a cryogenic temperature of -163ºC and then re-gasified, this releases cold energy before feeding most of its applications. The cold energy released during this process can be recovered for other applications – cryogenic air separation is one of them. However, this application is nothing new to the Asia-Pacific region.
... to continue reading you must be subscribed
