LNG

BASF Group, the German oil and gas and chemicals company, said the latest Malaysian floating LNG production hull owned by Petronas had selected BASF’s “OASE purple” process for its Acid Gas Removal Unit.

BASF, headquartered in the Rhine River city of Ludwigshafen, said the Petronas-owned vessel, the “PFLNG Dua”, is the first global user of the process.

The German company noted that Petronas successfully started up “FLNG Dua” in February 2021 and completed its performance test run in May 2021.

Petronas, the world leader in FLNG output, said in January 2021 that the “PFLNG Dua” had entered production in a joint venture with Thailand’s energy company PTTEP over the Rotan gas field offshore Sabah.

The vessel is deployed over the gas located 140 kilometres off Kota Kinabalu in Sabah state on the northern part of the island of Borneo.

The “PFLNG Dua” was constructed at the South Korean shipyard, Samsung Heavy Industries.

The first Petronas LNG hull, “PFLNG Satu”, became the world’s first FLNG vessel to start commercial operations in 2017 over the Kanowit gas field offshore Sarawak, another Malaysian state on Borneo.

Output

The “PFLNG Dua” has production capacity of 1.5 million tonnes of LNG per annum.

BASF said its “OASE purple” process is an amine-based solution that is utilized for the removal of acid gases such as carbon-dioxide (CO2) and hydrogen-sulfide (H2S) from natural gas.

The removal of acid gases is necessary to prepare the gas for the liquefaction and subsequent pipeline transportation.

“The highly efficient and environmentally friendly BASF technology provides flexibility and low capital expenditure for its customers,” said BASF.

“Additionally, the low energy demand of the process combined with the non-corrosive nature of the solvent keeps operating and maintenance costs (OPEX) low,” the German company added.

BASF explained that the process also provided a high level of gas purity and gas recovery while keeping solvent losses to a minimum.

“We are proud to now have our first FLNG reference in operation and running at 100 percent capacity, which is the fruit of many years of research,” said Andreas Northemann, Head of BASF’s Gas Treatment business.

“We applied our onshore LNG expertise and conducted motion studies and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to ensure a high reliability, low maintenance design which meets our customer’s stringent offshore specifications and challenges,” added Northemann.