14. Effect of the Transport Properties on the Design of a Plant and on the Economy of the Sweetening Process of Natural Gas Using Membranes

The development of new membranes for gaseous separations has been focused on the improvement of their gas transport properties in order to obtain highly pure products, higher gas flows to be treated, and materials that are more resistant to the operation conditions. In the present study, the comparison between two commercially available membranes for the sweetening process of natural gas and one membrane synthesized at the Instituto Mexicano del Petróleo (IMP) is carried out. The size of plants, their investment, operation, and gas processing costs are analyzed. It was found that the IMP membrane required less permeation area, lower investment, maintenance, and operation costs and promoted methane loss savings in the permeation stream and a lower gas processing cost.