Hawiyah Gas Plant represented the first expansion of the Master Gas System (MGS) since the 1970s. It was an essential component of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's core industrial equipment, addressing the grid overload resulting from an unexpected surge in domestic demand for natural gas fuels and feedstock. The plant provided the necessary facilities for processing sour gas from al-Khuff and al-Jawf deep, high-pressure reservoirs.
Significance of Hawiyah Gas Plant
The Hawiyah Gas Plant is considered part of the Ghawar Field, which is recognized as the world's largest land oilfield. Saudi Aramco acknowledged the significance of gas forty-five years ago and now operates ten gas processing plants: Berri, Shedgum, Uthmaniyah, Hawiyah, Haradh, Khursaniyah, Wasit, Midyan, Fadhili, and north of the Kingdom.
To meet the Kingdom's growing energy demand, Saudi Aramco continued to expand the master gas system (MGS). The Hawiyah Gas Plant, completed in 2001, was the first plant built to particularly recover non-associated gas from the gas reservoir, instead of producing it as an oil byproduct.
Expansion of Hawiyah Gas Plant
As part of the ongoing improvement and expansion of crude oil and gas facilities, Saudi Aramco expanded the Hawiyah Gas Plant in 2009 to process an additional eight hundred million ft of non-associated gas per day. This increased the plant's processing capacity to 2.4 billion ft per day.
Enhanced oil recovery techniques refer to the injection of a substance ‘such as captured carbon dioxide’ into an oil reservoir to increase its productivity. The Hawiyah Gas Plant has the potential to capture and process forty-five million ft of carbon dioxide, then pump it along eighty-five km to the Uthamaniyah oilfield. This marks one of the major initiatives for enhanced carbon-based oil recovery in the Middle East, aiming to inject it into the oil reservoir, which helps to reduce emissions and improve oil extraction.
Programs aimed at improving production from existing gas fields also included upgrading the capacity of new gas processing facilities, such as the Hawiyah Gas Plant, to add more than 1.1 billion ft per day, increasing the plant's production capacity to about 3.6 billion ftper day and rendering it one of the world's largest gas processing plants.
Activities of Hawiyah Gas Plant
Sales gas produced at the Hawiyah Gas Plant is sent to the adjacent natural gas liquids (NGL) recovery plant in Hawiyah, where high-value natural gas liquids are recovered. These liquids are then transported to other Saudi Aramco plants, where they are segmented for later use as feedstock in the petrochemical industry. Remaining sales gas quantities are fed into the company’s MGS – a vast pipeline network that caters to all the energy requirements of major sectors, power plants, and desalination plants in the Kingdom.
Alongside increasing the plant's capacity, the expansion incorporates an array of new technologies aimed at enhancing the plant's energy efficiency and mitigating emissions harmful to the environment. These technologies include:
- Heat Recovery Steam Generators are utilized to harness heat loss and convert it into useful steam, and a steam turbine generator is employed to capture and convert wasted energy into electric power.
- A flare gas extraction system, a liquid extraction and drainage system, and a burner purification system that utilizes nitrogen to cease combustion by extracting flare gas, capturing burned gases and liquids, and subsequently recycling them for treatment.
As an extension of the development activities and utilization of new technologies in Saudi Aramco's business, an innovative hydraulic turbine electric generator (turbocharger) was installed in 2015. This turbine provides three hundred kW of electric power by harnessing wasted hydraulic power.
The operation of this generator has saved the company colossal sums annually and reduced the carbon footprint of the Hawiyah Gas Plant. Not to mention, this marks the first application of this technology globally. This turbocharger has placed the Hawiyah Gas Plant on the global map of energy and environmental efficiency.
Achievements of Hawiyah Gas Plant
In 2019, the Hawiyah Gas Plant became the first gas plant in Saudi Aramco to process unconventional gas from six unconventional gas fields south of Ghawar.
As a result of its expanding activities and the application of modern technologies, the Hawiyah Gas Plant has won a number of awards, these awards include the President's Operational Excellence Award 2019 and the King Abdulaziz Quality Award 2020, making it the only Saudi Aramco plant to be nominated for and win this prestigious award. This comes in addition to the President's Golden Award for Excellence in 2021, awarded for best performance in the field of natural gas and liquid extraction.
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