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Designing and operating a natural gas transmission system can significantly reduce the fuel and associated operating hours on compression equipment, both factors that can have a significant impact on the costs of transport. There are multiple ways to approach this from design concept to day to day operation. Techniques include optimum equipment selection such as compression units with high overall efficiency, optimized pipeline diameter/internal coatings, and the ability to transfer gas between pipelines that operate in parallel. How the system is operated can also have significant impact on the operating costs. Techniques include optimizing pipeline pack, pressure profiles, and balancing system flows. This paper outlines some simple guidance on the techniques to perform system optimization. Practical implementation of optimization techniques are often constrained by many physical limitations. All optimization is subject to constraints. Examples include: the pressure may never exceed the maximum allowable operating pressure, a delivery pressure guarantee limits how low a pressure may go, and outages eliminate or restrict some of the options. In some cases, there are conflicting goals such as maximizing throughput while minimizing operating costs. In those cases, one of the goals has a higher priority, in this example, maximizing throughput. This does not mean that minimizing operating costs is no longer a goal. It means that focus on this goal occurs after the objectives of the primary goal have been satisfied. The key is defining optimization metrics that best measure the overall financial impact and identify all of the overriding constraints. It is critical in the development of optimization rules to have multiple viewpoints to identify all of the constraints and establish suitable goals and the associated measurement metrics. In some cases, the constraints themselves are opportunities for improvement.
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List Price $195.00