Economic evaluation of natural gas transportation from Iran's South-Pars gas field to market

The worldwide consumption of natural gas is rapidly increasing. To satisfy such a demand, there are some plans to transport natural gas from South-Pars gas field, the largest natural gas field of Iran, to some energy consuming countries. There are several possible technologies for transporting gas from production fields to consuming markets as gas, including PNG (pipeline natural gas), LNG (liquefied natural gas), CNG (compressed natural gas) and NGH (natural gas hydrate). Gas transmission projects are sensitive to technology selection and depending on the capacity and distance; chosen technology may affect the economy of the entire project noticeably. In this work, transporting 100 x 10(6) standard m(3)/d natural gas from port of Assaluyeh in south of Iran to potential markets using alternative technologies such as PNG, LNG, CNG and NGH has been investigated. To do such a study, required processes for converting natural gas to desired product and then transporting it to market have been designed and using an economical model, cost of transporting natural gas as a function of distance, has been estimated. Results show for the investigated case, PNG has the lowest production cost for distances up to 7600 km and for larger distances, LNG has the lowest production cost. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.