Prudent Molecular Management in Upstream

Natural gas production, utilization and evacuation from Upstream facilities are typically produced and evacuated as homogeneous streams, where oil and gas industry players focused predominantly on achieving gross production volumes and ensuring maximum facilities uptime to achieve the set sales target. Further processing happens at midstream, where this homogeneous natural gas will feed into a full-fledged gas processing plant to extract natural gas components into various products such as feedgas into power plant (mainly methane) ethane, LPG and condensate. In natural gas value chains where gas is evacuated directly to customers without undergoing full-scale processing, there is an opportunity to enhance value by extracting heavier components. These components typically command higher prices when sold as differentiated products, rather than as part of a homogeneous natural gas stream. Additionally, this approach would relieve customers with specific component preferences—such as power producers—of the need to invest in additional Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) and Operational Expenditure (OPEX) for installing and operating extraction systems to remove heavier components from their main product stream for further use. Further supporting this paradigm shift, Figure [2] represents the typical molecular composition of associated natural gas. Associated natural gas primarily consists of methane, with the remaining proportion consisting of smaller fraction of ethane, propane, butane, condensate and other components. As the carbon number in the gaseous component goes higher, so too does the hydrocarbon market value, with the range from Methane at ~3 USD/MMbtu to Condensate at ~12 USD/MMbtu. Simultaneously, the carbon intensity (kgCO2/mmbtu) rises, with Condensate having the highest at around 70 kgCO2/mmbtu. Extracting these heavier molecules requires progressively higher energy inputs and presents greater operational complexity due to their elevated dew points.