Designing a system for natural gas storage facilities in salt caverns

Natural gas is most widely used resource for energy and is also used by people in homes for heating. Countries that do not produce natural gas try to keep the balance between demand and supply. So, the importance of natural gas storage increases and investments increase day by day. In general, storage facilities are operated manually with traditional methods. When the operation starts, operators take all decisions. Which units are working, which cavern should be used, which valves are open or close, all decisions made by operators. This type of facilities has complex process and possibility of man-made mistake is high. It is aimed to minimize the man-made mistakes, operate the facilities effectively and continuously. In this study, a simulation is designed for the operations. The purpose is to make a PLC programming that include definition of operating parameters for all units in natural gas storage facilities, semi and full automatic operation, programming of the parameters and create SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) pages. The work is applied for sample facility that has 500.000.000 m3 total storage capacity with 30.000.000 m3/day injection and 50.000.000 m3/day withdrawn rate in three salt caverns. Therefore, a software simulation is prepared for natural gas storage facilities that can minimize the human being mistakes on operation, which is carried out with traditional methods.