November
2016
61
HYDROCARBON
ENGINEERING
E
arlier this year, the US government announced a set
of highly anticipated new regulations to govern the
emission of methane by the oil and gas industry.
The regulations currently focus primarily on
new build industrial equipment, but it is expected that the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will move to
increase regulations on existing equipment in the near
future, which will likely mean large scale investment.
Fugitive emissions have always been a key issue for oil
and gas companies. These are the small amounts of
material – mostly methane, but also other short chain
hydrocarbons – which escape from the many seals that
separate the oil and gas in pipes and process equipment
from the atmosphere.
Although each individual leak may be tiny, multiplying
up by the thousands of potential escape paths that exist
along the route from extraction to the end user can add up
to significant lost revenue for the operator, as well as an
increased impact on the environment.
Nowhere is it more important than in the refinery
environment, where large numbers of personnel and a great
deal of infrastructure investment are in close proximity to
highly volatile process media – sometimes only a short
distance from residential areas.
Controlling fugitive emissions is one of the most important technical
challenges facing the oil and gas industry. Valves play a central role
in this, but, as
Paul Shillito, Oliver Valves, UK,
explains, there can
be a limit to the level of tightness operators should be aiming for.
