The oil and gas industry is changing, and reciprocating compressor applications are changing with it. Carbon capture and sequestration, hydrogen compression, and lower-carbon natural gas applications are creating new compressor applications with analysis requirements that differ from traditional gas gathering and pipeline work.
Carbon Capture Applications
CO2 compression for carbon capture and sequestration involves gas properties significantly different from natural gas — higher density, different acoustic velocity, and phase behavior near the critical point. Pulsation analysis for CO2 compression requires careful attention to these properties, particularly for installations operating near the CO2 critical pressure.
Tech Transfer has experience with CO2 injection compressor analysis from offshore enhanced oil recovery applications. This experience provides a foundation for the carbon capture applications that are becoming more prevalent.
Hydrogen Applications
Hydrogen compression presents different challenges. Hydrogen has a very high acoustic velocity — nearly four times that of natural gas at the same conditions. This shifts all acoustic resonance frequencies significantly, which affects bottle sizing and piping acoustic design.
The high acoustic velocity of hydrogen also means that acoustic resonances occur at higher frequencies, where they are more likely to interact with structural natural frequencies that were not problematic in natural gas service.
Our Commitment
As applications change, our analytical methods evolve to address them. The fundamental physics of acoustic propagation and structural dynamics do not change with the gas being compressed — but the specific application of those physics to hydrogen or CO2 requires careful attention to the properties of those gases.
Tech Transfer is committed to developing and maintaining the specific expertise needed to provide accurate, reliable analysis for emerging compressor applications, as we have done for traditional applications over the past 35 years.
