Abstract
In northern countries, such as Finland, the heat and electricity consumption are strongly affected by seasonal conditions. Thus in the cold and dark winter season the consumption is higher than during the other periods of the year. This leads to a strong seasonal component in the demand of natural gas, which is mainly used by heat and power plants. The current study focuses on the natural gas pipeline in Finland and considers options of extending the pipeline to new cities and/or connecting it with future LNG terminals. The simulation of the gas pipeline is based on information about the present layout, outdoor temperatures and a rough estimate of the distribution of the consumption in the nodes. For a given pipe network and given demands, it provides information about the pressures, flow rates and compressor duties. Furthermore, using the model within an optimisation framework, the feasibility of extending the pipeline to new regions and/or connecting LNG sites with regasification facilities to the network can be studied. The task is formulated as an MINLP optimisation problem, where, e.g., the choice of suitable sites for new LNG terminals in Finland can be evaluated, considering the future development of the whole natural gas distribution network and the gas demand around it. This is a key issue to decrease the dependence on the present energy supply paths and to increase the capacity without pipeline investments in remote regions.
