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Interview with Adriano Gentilucci, commercial director IMEA for Dow, oil, gas and mining

Industry

How does the Dow AMINE MANAGEMENTSM Program work?

The Dow AMINE MANAGEMENTSM Program is a comprehensive gas sweetening service programme that targets the gas treating amine systems to achieve environmental compliance while improving reliability, reducing energy costs and preserving the integrity of assets. Dow AMP is tailored to each customer’s performance objectives, of process optimisation, energy efficiency and asset integrity, ultimately helping them optimise total system costs. The service program uses Dow’s proprietary state-of-the-art simulation software, which offers customers best-in-class performance prediction technology.

All Dow’s UCARSOLTM customers have access to this programme. Our key customers usually have a dedicated technical resource onsite working closely with the facility’s operational team to help ensure that the gas plant is operating at optimal performance.

What encourages you to participate in SOGAT every year? What are you presenting at SOGAT this year?

Since being founded in 2004, SOGAT has consistently gathered the leading sour gas technology leaders together and has evolved into the region’s leading sour gas conference. Dow has been at the forefront of gas treating technology for more than seven decades, with over 50 project references in the Middle East and more than 1,000 worldwide. SOGAT provides us with an opportunity to feature some of our technical experience and knowhow, as well as to engage with our customers and understand how the local industry is evolving and the trends driving industry.

This year, in addition to sponsoring SOGAT, Dow will present a technical paper about a newly formulated series of specialty solvents, UCARSOL™ TGT that we have developed and successfully demonstrated with a unique molecule which improves H2S removal performance. When compared to commodity MDEA, this newly developed series offers economically competitive alternatives for reduction in sulfur emissions in high temperature environments and in plants where one would like to mitigate daily or seasonal temperature influences on sulfur emissions. By introducing this technology to the UAE market, we aim to address the challenge of the removal of residual hydrogen sulfide from low pressure sulfur plant tail gas at elevated lean amine or ambient temperatures. This will in turn help in improvement of air quality through reduction of sulfur emissions from industrial facilities.

In addition, Dow will host a technical workshop for the region’s gas treating experts on 27 March as part of SOGAT’s annual workshop series. The workshop aims to facilitate an in-depth discussion on various types of amines available in the market and their characteristics, chemistries & reactivities for gas treating applications. This will include an overview of Amine Unit Processes, schemes, equipment designs and various factors influencing amine solvent selection with focus on evolution of gas treating solvents and new technologies.

In your opinion, where is the industry heading and how can Dow contribute to addressing regional needs?

During this year’s World Future Energy Summit (WFES), the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) announced that it plans to introduce measures that will increase energy efficiencies by 10 per cent by 2020. The energy efficiency strategy will reduce ADNOC’s gas consumption by 156 million cubic feet per day, saving a total of US$1 billion by 2020. Dow continuously works towards developing solutions which help with such optimisation. 

For instance, Dow offers operators a lower-cost, value-added option, particularly for small-scale gas treatment - UCARSORB™ Natural Gas Liquid (NGL) Adsorbents. This highly selective system is designed to allow water, CO2 and NGLs of lesser value to slip through the bed, removing and capturing only targeted NGLs. Previously, if the goal was to generate a separate NGL stream or simply exclude NGLs from contaminating a process, a large scale, high-cost cryogenic, refrigeration or other low-temperature unit was required to separate out NGLs. The UCARSORB™ system is a selective and effective means to remove and recover NGLs, reducing emissions without sacrificing combustion engine power and efficiency.

Another good example is the aforementioned mentioned AMINE MANAGEMENTSM Program that has as its goals, process and cost optimisation as well as improving energy efficiencies.