NEW TREND FOR GAS PIPELINE NETWORKS DESIGN

Abstract

Nowadays, natural gas plays an important role in the world energy market due to the growing expansion of natural gas applications as a fuel and as a feedstock for the fertilizers and petrochemical industries. As an example, natural gas constitutes 24.3% of the world energy consumption in 2002. The rapid growth in the consumption of natural gas at the expense of other fuels especially coal was due to several advantages as natural gas is the least fossil fuel that produces polluting or corrosive substances and it has a possibility of improved combustion control. The said dramatic growth of NG consumption obviously yields more construction of natural gas pipeline transportation system. The construction or expansion of pipeline systems involves a large capital expenditure as well as continuing operation and maintenance costs. These high costs dictate the need of a good compromise of technical and economical considerations in the phases of pipeline industry. Optimization has an important role in achieving this compromise. Several researchers have attempted applying optimization techniques to pipeline problems. A literature survey included in this thesis highlights the pipeline problems handled by optimization in the main phases of pipeline industry namely: design, expansion, operation and control. Consequently, the main purpose of this work is to study the application of optimization in the design and operation of gas pipeline systems. Attention was paid to two common pipeline problems. The first is how to maximize the gas sales from fields to consumers as gas tariff is different for every consumer according to the required gas delivery pressure. The second is how to minimize the gas transport cost. The gas transport cost is assumed to depend on gas quantity and distance traversed from field to consumer. It was found that Linear Programming(LP) is the most efficient tool that can handle this type of