Shell Oil Comapny

Karel Antonius Kusters

Gerrit Konijn

Bernardinus Henricus Bosmans

Johan Jan Barend Pek

Jose Luis Bravo

Meta Jannetta Van Veghel

The present invention relates to a method of cooling and separating a hydrocarbon stream: (a) passing an hydrocarbon feed stream () through a first cooling and separation stage to provide a methane enriched vapour overhead stream () and a methane depleted liquid stream (); (b) passing the methane depleted liquid stream () to a fractionation column () to obtain a bottom condensate stream (), a top stream enriched in C1-C2 () and a midstream enriched in C3-C4 (), (c) cooling the upper part of the fractionation column () by a condenser (), (d) obtaining a split stream () from the methane enriched vapour overhead stream () and obtaining a cooled split stream (') by expansion-cooling the split stream (), (e) providing cooling duty to the top of the fractionation column () using the cooled split stream (&#x2032;).

Method and system for cooling and separating a hydrocarbon stream

Gas-liquid contacting tray having a bubble area and one or more rectangular downcomers which are longer in length than in width, which downcomers have two sloped downcomer walls along their length, a downcomer opening at tray level and one or more downward directed liquid discharge openings at the lower end, which downcomers are so positioned on the tray that bubble area is present at both of the longer sides, wherein the cross-sectional area at the lower end of the downcomer is less than 40% of the cross-sectional area of the upper end of the downcomer at tray level.

Gas-liquid contacting tray

A gas-liquid contacting column is described with a number of axially spaced trays, each having two sections separated along a diametrical line on the tray, and having a number of parallel rectangular downcomers, open at the upper end and closed at the bottom end, which has a number of liquid discharge openings, and a number of liquid receiving areas with bubble area between them. The liquid receiving area is positioned just below the downcomer of a consecutive tray just above. The downcomers extend from the diametrical line to the circumferential of the tray such that the ends of the downcomers of the two tray sections are positioned along the diametrical line in an alternating manner, wherein the area of the liquid discharge openings per downcomer length as viewed from below and close to the diametrical line is less than that as viewed from below.

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Amsterdam, Netherlands

Karel Antonius Kusters