Rapid estimation of water content of sour natural gases

Water is associated with natural gas from the reservoir, through production and processing and is a concern in transmission. Also the water content of sour natural gases is an important parameter in the design of facilities for the natural gas production, transmission, and processing. The aim of this study is to develop an easy-to-use method which is simpler than current available models involving a large number of parameters and requiring more complicated and longer computations, for an appropriate estimation of water content of sour natural gas mixtures containing up to 40% acid gas components (CO₂ and H₂S). The new developed method works for pressures ranging from 1000 to 15,000 kPa and temperatures from 15 to 120°C. Simple-to-use approach can be of immense practical value for the engineers and scientists to have a quick check on the water content of sour natural gases at various temperatures and pressures without performing any experimental measurements. In particular, gas process engineers would find the proposed approach to be user friendly involving no complex expressions with transparent calculations. Results have been compared with the reported data and excellent agreement has been obtained between the predicted results and observed values. The average absolute deviations from the reported data were found to be 3.5%.