Persian Gulf Bid Boland Gas Refinery in Khuzestan Province will be operational in August, the managing director said.
“The refinery will start operation with 20 million cubic meters of gas or 30% of its total production capacity,” Naftema website quoted Mahmoud Amin-Nejad as saying
Located in Behbahan County in the southwest, Bid Boland is the Middle East’s largest refinery with an annual production capacity of 10.4 million tons of methane, 1.5 million tons ethane, 1 million tons propane, 600,000 tons gas condensates and 500,000 tons butane.
With the new refinery production of sweet and other gases will increase, which will be used to feed petrochemical plants in Mahshahr and supply urban areas in the region. Exports are also anticipated.
The refinery will supply feedstock through a 1,200-kilometer pipeline -- the West Ethylene Pipeline -- that runs from Asalouyeh in the south to West Azarbaijan Province in the northwest.
Equipped with facilities to separate ethane from methane, the refinery will help diversify petrochemical output, which is presently allocated to urea and ammoniac production. Separation of the two chemicals s expected to increase productivity and cut waste.
Bid Boland gas treating facility will be fed by gas from the supergiant South Pars, Aghajari and Aghaz fields.
The refinery will process a significant portion of the gases burned in flares or re-injected into oil wells, preventing them from being wasted and instead producing value-added products from them
Refineries are among the major consumers of water for cooling towers. During the treatment and refining of sour gas, large quantity of wastewater is produced.
“With the construction of evaporation ponds in Bid Boland, no industrial water will flow out of the refinery,” Amin-Nejad said.
The refinery is also equipped with a modern vapor recovery unit that can collect environmentally-hazardous vapors to be reprocessed or destroyed.
“More than 67% of the equipment used in the refinery has come from Iranian companies and manufacturers,” Amin-Nejad noted.
Processing APG
Billed as important, the refinery will process significant volumes of associated petroleum gas burned in flares or re-injected into oil wells, preventing them from being wasted and instead producing value-added products.
The refinery is set to be a driver of major change in reducing environmental pollution and improving the petrochemical industry.
APG in oil fields is often burnt off in a practice known as flaring in order to make way for oil production. Not only are tremendous quantities of gas wasted, but 1% of the global greenhouse gas is also emitted in the process. The bulk of Iran’s gas flaring occurs in the southern oil fields.
The mega project of Bid Bolan Refinery, which cost $3.5 billion, has a capacity to process 56 million cubic meters a day of associated petroleum gas, enough to produce 3.5 million tons of feedstock for use in petrochemical plants in Khuzestan province.
Regarding the collection of flare gas in the region, Amin-Nejad said earlier this year that the National Iranian Oil Company and Persian Gulf Petrochemical Industries Company were to begin gathering of associated gases in Khuzestan.
NIOC has 30 projects to collect associated gas in the East Karoon region. Most of the projects are small-scale and will be completed within two years. They seek to prevent the burning of 22 million cubic meters of associated gases in Khuzestan and be used as feedstock for petrochemical facilities. The gas will be supplied to Bid Boland and Maroon petrochemical projects.
Flare stacks are the main contributors to the worsening air pollution in the southwestern oil-rich province of Khuzestan.
Collecting APG from oil and gas fields is a priority of the Oil Ministry to help safeguard the environment, prevent loss of national wealth and create jobs.
Flaring is the venting of natural gas that cannot be processed or sold. Collection of APG is an important safety measure at many oil and gas production sites, as it prevents industrial plant equipment from over-pressure and explosion.
Since 2008 Iran has prevented the flaring of over 12 billion cubic meters of APG. Despite the measures, Iran has the highest rate of energy waste in the form of APG in the Middle East and ranks third in the world in terms of gas flaring after Russia and Iraq.
According to the Majlis Research Center, approximately 17 bcm of gas is flared and wasted annually -- $6 billion net loss for the treasury.
Gas flaring is a global problem that is getting worse. The World Bank reported a 3% increase in gas flaring on a global scale in 2018. It said oil production sites around the world were burning approximately 140 bcm of natural gas annually.
