Twister - Innovations In Gas Processing

Twister BV offers innovative technology and services for a wide range of natural gas processing applications. Currently our principal capabilities and expertise include:

Twister™ Supersonic Gas Technologies:

• Dehydration
• Dewpointing
• NGL recovery

Twister BV Services:

• Conceptual engineering
• Process engineering (HYSYS)
• Project management
• Commissioning and operations support
• Flow solutions (CFD - multi-phase flow modelling)

We are a Shell-affiliated company with headquarters in the Netherlands. Through contracting arrangements and strategic partnerships with leading design and fabrication companies, we have established a global network offering cost effective, quick delivery gas processing systems.

TWISTER SUPERSONIC GAS PROCESSING

Twister™ is an innovative, safe and environmentally friendly gas conditioning technology that uses condensation and separation at supersonic velocity to achieve some unique benefits. The residence time inside Twister is only milliseconds, allowing hydrates no time to form and avoiding the need for hydrate inhibition chemicals. The elimination of the associated chemical regeneration systems prevent harmful BTX emissions to the environment. The simplicity and reliability of a static device, with no rotating parts, operating without chemicals, ensures a simple facility with high availability. The compact and low weight Twister system can be installed on a minimum facilities platform, and is suitable for unmanned operation in remote and / or offshore environments.

LOW PRESSURE DROP TWISTER

An improved performance low pressure drop Twister is now available. This design achieves an equivalent performance to the original Twister at a 25% lower pressure drop. It can also achieve a greatly improved hydrocarbon and NGL recovery performance. Closed-loop testing has confirmed that the Low Pressure Drop Twister can recover 20% more NGL's than a JT-LTS system operating at the same process conditions.

Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Ltd (SPDC) placed an order for a 120 MMscfd Twister onshore gas dewpointing system in May 2006. The plant incorporates the Low Pressure Drop Twister, and is expected to start up mid-2007.

OPERATING EXPERIENCE

After extensive Twister testing at five onshore gas plants in the Netherlands, Nigeria and Norway, Petronas and Sarawak Shell Berhad (SSB) purchased two 300 MMscfd Twister dehydration trains which started up on the B11 platform offshore Malaysia in December 2003. The Twister system on B11 has operated continuously since start up achieving the guaranteed 98% availability.

FLOW SOLUTIONS

Over the last decade, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has become a mature engineering tool within the process industry. More recently CFD has also been accepted in the oil and gas industry as an important tool to evaluate the performance of process equipment. Twister BV has developed and validated a unique CFD code based on Ansys-CFX for modelling multi-phase flow phenomena in real gas media. This unique CFD code, combined with our in depth gas processing expertise, provides a powerful capability for performance analysis and optimisation of process equipment. Twister BV now offers this capability as a commercial service to the wider processing industry.