Garbage in equals garbage out. That’s an old saying but it still applies to many things. In this case it relates to trying to define a basis for a project. Our client was looking to send their gas to an existing LNG facility that was designed for 25 ppmv inlet BTEX concentration. It was reported that the new gas our client had was above this. So we were to study the impact this would have on the existing LNG facility and possible solutions to remove it. Being good process engineers our first step was to establish a design basis. There was a number of samples with a wide range of BTEX concentrations. So it was decided to get three different laboratories to collect samples and report the BTEX levels. The results were:
Lab 1 49 ppmv
Lab 2 396 ppmv
Lab 3 78 ppmv
Needless to say this did not give us much confidence to establish a design basis. We had to go into greater details about sampling and analysis methods as well as more sampling and sampling of different streams for material balancing and other efforts in order to try to determine what was the real concentration. Because without a good design basis we are back to garbage in equals garbage out, and we aid our clients by reducing the garbage around their projects.