The Saturated Gas Plant (SGP) — also referred to as a Gas Concentration Unit (GCU) or refinery gas recovery plant — is the central light-ends recovery facility that processes the combined off-gases and unstabilized hydrocarbon liquids from refinery units producing paraffinic (olefin-free) light hydrocarbons. Its feeds originate principally from the crude and vacuum distillation units (CDU/VDU), hydrotreaters (naphtha, diesel, VGO), hydrocrackers including mild hydrocracking configurations, solvent deasphalting (SDA) units, and catalytic reformers.

The plant's function is threefold:
(1) recover valuable C₃⁺ hydrocarbons (LPG and naphtha) from streams that would otherwise be downgraded to fuel gas
(2) reject light ends (C₁/C₂, hydrogen) to the refinery fuel gas system or hydrogen recovery
(3) deliver specification-grade intermediate products — stabilized naphtha and sweetened LPG — to downstream treating, blending, or petrochemical feedstock pools.

The plant is termed "saturated" because its feed streams contain essentially no olefins, in contrast to the unsaturated (cracked) gas plant serving the FCC and other conversion units, which handles olefin-rich gases and incorporates olefin recovery facilities such as propane-propylene superfractionators. Segregating the two gas plants allows each to be optimized independently: olefin recovery economics on the cracked side, and simple, robust LPG/naphtha recovery on the saturated side — a configuration increasingly favored in petrochemical-integrated refinery complexes.

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