An overview of Organic Rankine Cycle for waste heat recovery on offshore oil and gas platform

Abstract

Researchers have analyzed Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) recently on its potential for waste heat recovery (WHR) on offshore oil and gas platform. However, there is still no practical application of ORC on this sector currently. An extensive overview of the ORC for offshore oil and gas platform has been performed in this paper. The discussion investigates the capability of this technology as the WHR for offshore oil and gas platform application. In this study, a brief explanation of the process that happened on the offshore platform which is the potential source of waste heat to be recovered will be given. The studies conducted by previous researcher on the offshore application were reviewed and the benefits of ORC were emphasized and some information on the configuration of the ORC on offshore oil and gas platform were described. ORC was found to be able to adapt to low or medium grade which is between 150–400 °C heat source with different type of configurations. The flexibility of ORC makes it easier to be used on offshore oil and gas platform with different configuration and contribute to many advantages. The electricity generated can increased up to 20.3%, 11.3% increase in the overall system efficiency and 18.3% in the utilization factor. Furthermore, an average reduction of 22% in the fuel consumption and CO2 emissions could be achieved over the platform operating years. Dry and isentropic fluids are more suitable to be the working fluid of ORC system on offshore application which could lead to better system performance and efficiency. Cyclopentane had been widely used as it is thermally stable in the temperature range between 220 and 350 °C. From the economic aspects, although involving ORC could increase the initial investment cost up to 46%, it also increases the net present value, leading to a discount rate up to 10%.