Liquefied natural gas submerged combustion vaporization facilities: process integration with power conversion units

Liquefied natural gas (LNG) vaporization facilities offer an excellent opportunity of primary energy saving by means of integration with power conversion units that is still weakly exploited in actual installations. This work focuses on the evaluation of primary energy saving achievable by the integration of an LNG vaporization facility with a gas turbine and with a cogenerative combined gas-steam power plant. The fuel energy saving ratio is used as the main performance parameter to evaluate the primary energy saving derived by system integration, with respect to conventional submerged combustion vaporization. Twelve possible configurations are analyzed with steady-state calculations. Results show that a primary energy saving greater than 15% with peak values up to 27%, corresponding to 2.98TJ/year, is achievable. The paper shows that the fuel energy saving ratio can be used as a synthetic and effective parameter to estimate the energy-saving potential of different plant configurations. © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.