InnSep

Value areas

Oil and gas processing

Gas/liquid separation on offshore installations, Lynx 250

Pilot (2016)

Tested at full scale or at a user site. The level records the highest step reached, with the year.

The problem

Liquid that passes through a conventional separator trips compressors and disturbs gas processing further down the line. Conventional separators need large volumes, and they lose efficiency as pressure rises.

What the Lynx separator does

The Lynx 250 separator removes the liquid fractions that pass through conventional scrubbers.

It holds its capacity through high liquid loads and variations in flow, and it does not flood.

It takes 50 to 70 per cent less volume than comparable gas/liquid separators, which is what makes a retrofit possible on a platform that has no free space.

Two men at a stainless steel separator built into an outdoor test loop, with bolted flanges and instrument lines. One of them reaches over the top of the unit.
The Lynx separator in the hydrocarbon test loop at CEESI in the USA, 14 December 2012. Sondre K. Jacobsen of InnSep on the right, with an engineer from CEESI. The principle was tested with hydrocarbons up to 60 bar.
The same test rig seen from further back: the Lynx separator tied into insulated process piping, with a steel walkway, stairs and a ladder beside it.
The same rig half a minute later, from the walkway. The Lynx unit is the stainless steel housing in the middle of the loop, and the stairs give the scale.
Panorama of the CEESI flow test station at first light: process piping, pressure vessels and control cabinets spread across open ground.
The CEESI test station, 20 December 2012. This is where the testing was carried out, in a live hydrocarbon flow.

What happened, and when

  • The Lynx 250 was tested at the Statoil high pressure test facility at Rotvoll in Trondheim in the spring of 2016. Efficiency and K-factor were confirmed up to 90 bar, across variations in gas/liquid ratio and flow speed.
  • Conventional gas/liquid separators lose efficiency steadily as pressure rises. The Lynx 250 qualified at less than a third of that reduction.
  • The unit is PED certified. The certification was carried out at MOMEK in May 2015.
  • The Lynx principle was tested with hydrocarbons up to 60 bar at CEESI in the USA in 2012. High pressure gas/liquid testing of the Lynx 250 was also carried out at CEESI.
  • The Lynx separator was one of six innovations nominated for the Norwegian Tech Award in 2015, the prize formerly known as TEKNA's Ingeniørbragd. The other five were Zaptec, nLink, Bright Products, Norsk Titanium and eSmart Systems.
  • InnSep presented the Rotvoll results and the first commercial application of the principle, for the Grane platform, at the TEKNA separation technology conference in Stavanger on 30 September 2016.
  • InnSep invited operators to a joint industry project for a full scale pilot in October 2016, with the Norwegian Research Council and the DEMO 2000 programme.
  • The separator was shown at ONS in Stavanger in 2016. Five retrofit cases were set out: after the main separator, in front of rotating equipment, in parallel for de-bottlenecking, as replacement internals, and as replacement of the main separator.

Evidence in the archive

Get in touch

Contact

Sondre Jacobsen

CEO, InnSep AS

+47 980 43 205
sondre@innsep.com

This is the contact route for InnSep. For the Lynx Kitchen system, go to lynxkitchen.com.