SHELL flaring ethane gas at Mossmorran, Scotland

From an Article by Angie Brown, BBC Scotland, October 2, 2019

Shell has been forced to burn off “significant” volumes of ethane because it cannot sell it to a firm that has temporarily shut down its plant with flaring issues in Fife.

Residents living near the Mossmorran site thought flaring would be reduced after Exxonmobil closed in August. However, flares have continued to burn because Shell’s only ethane customer is Exxonmobil, which shares the site.

Shell said it was “actively exploring alternative ethane outlets”.

Exxonmobil chose to temporarily close its plant to undertake maintenance on its boilers.

Shell’s Fife Natural Gas Liquids plant separates natural gas liquids into ethane, propane, butane and natural gasoline for storage and onward distribution. It sells its ethane to Exxonmobil’s neighbouring Fife Ethylene plant, which turns it into ethylene.

Since the Fife Ethylene Plant was temporarily closed down Shell said it “did not have the storage capacity for the significant quantities of ethane produced from North Sea gas”.

Exxonmobil’s plant at the site will be closed until at least November for work to be carried out to make the plant more “reliable”.

A total of £140m of work will also be spent by Exxonmobil improving the plant. ExxonMobil said it had started recruiting 850 temporary workers to carry out the work over the next 12 months. The operator said the investment was on top of the £20m it spends annually on maintaining its Mossmorran site.

A Shell Fife Natural Gas Liquids spokesman said: “The (ExxonMobil) Fife Ethylene Plant is currently the primary customer for ethane supplied by the Shell Fife Natural Gas Liquids plant, and processes ethane into ethylene.

“Our ground flares are burning excess ethane as the Fife Ethylene plant is currently not available for receiving the ethane to process it into ethylene.

“We have taken measures within the North Sea (SEGAL) supply system to help to manage the situation and are actively exploring alternative ethane outlets during the temporary shutdown.

“However, the volume taken by the Fife Ethylene plant is significant and any solution is likely to be for some volume rather than the full volume of ethane the Fife Natural Gas Liquids plant produces.”

James Glen, chairman of the Mossmorran Action Group, said: “I think it is ironic that Shell is being forced to flare off excess product because of the problems at Exxonmobil.

“Residents had hoped for some respite but they are having to continue to suffer from light and noise impact as a result of Shell’s flaring.”

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See also: Flaring, or Why So Much Gas Is Going Up in Flames – The Washington Post, Ryan Collins and Rachel Adams-Heard | Bloomberg, September 10, 2019

If you take a drive along the well-worn highways of West Texas, orange flames will punctuate your journey. Those are gas flares, and they’re lighting up the skies above West Texas oilfields like never before as drillers produce crude faster than pipes can be laid to haul the attendant natural gas away. Oil drillers say flaring is the most environmentally friendly way to get rid of excess gas they can’t sell. Environmentalists say that in many cases what flaring is friendly to is oil drillers’ profits. They think regulators in states including Texas and North Dakota should be tougher on a practice that harms air quality and contributes to climate change.

Evergas Tankers Transport Ethane from Marcus Hook to Europe

From an Article by Mike Corkhill, LNG World Shipping, July 26, 2018

The first of a pair of very large ethane carriers (VLECs) under construction at the Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Co (DSIC) shipyard for Evergas has been floated out from its building dock. The occasion was accompanied by cutting first steel for the second of the pair.

The two 85,000 m3 ethane carriers will be chartered to INEOS Trading & Shipping to carry ethane from the US Gulf to China. SP Chemicals has contracted to buy the cargoes that the first of the two VLECs will transport, for use as feedstock in a new 650,000 tonnes per annum ethylene cracker it is building at Taixing in China’s Jiangsu province.

The two newbuildings represent an extension of the ethane delivery capabilities of the shipping and trading arm of the giant INEOS petrochemical group. INEOS Trading & Shipping already charters eight 27,500 m3 Evergas-operated, Dragon-class ethane carriers for the transatlantic delivery of competitively priced US ethane to group ethylene crackers at Grangemouth in Scotland and Rafnes in Norway.

The first of the DSIC newbuildings is due for completion in Q1 2019. The pair, like the Dragon-class ethane carriers, are being built to the semi-pressurised/fully refrigerated (semi-ref) gas carrier design.

The vessels represent the first application of the semi-ref design to very large gas carriers and will be fitted with the largest IMO Type C pressure vessel cargo tanks ever constructed. IMO Type C gas tank containment systems do not require a secondary barrier.

Three of the four cargo tanks on each VLEC are being built to the Star Tri-lobe configuration to help optimise the cargo-carrying space available when the Type C containment system is chosen. The largest of the tri-lobe units, which consist of three cylinders combined into one, on the DSIC VLECs has a capacity of 23,000 m3 and weighs 1,800 tonnes.

For a given hull envelope, the tri-lobe solution offers a 20% increase in cargo space compared to using bi-lobe tanks. The Star Tri-lobe design was developed by JHW Engineering and Contracting in co-operation with the Hartmann Group. JHW, like Evergas, is part of the Jaccar Group.

Each of the DSIC VLECs will be powered by one of MAN’s M-type electronically controlled gas-injection (ME-GI) main engines. MAN designates the ethane-burning version of the ME-GI engine as its ME-GIE unit. Each vessel will be provided with a pair of deck-mounted cylindrical tanks to hold ethane fuel.

MAN Energy Solutions has supplied the 6G60 ME-GIE engine for each VLEC complete with its newly developed pump vaporiser unit (PVU), a device that ensures the supply of high-pressure gas to the ME-GIE engine in the correct manner. Providing full pump redundancy, the PVU costs less and occupies less space than previous fuel-gas supply systems for MAN’s high-pressure engines.