(555d) Developing E3 Crude Oil Blending Strategy for Petroleum Refineries

Crude oil blending is a very common practice in petroleum refineries, where the main focus is to minimize the total purchasing cost of the crude oils under specified blending oil properties. Crude-oil blending also has a significant impact on the energy consumption during the crude-oil processing, because the product qualities of crude-oil processing to the downstream process usually should be kept as constant as possible. Conceivably, the energy consumption will heavily influence the emission of greenhouse gas (GHG) such as CO2. In this paper, an energy and emission considered economic crude-oil blending (E3) strategy is presented. The E3 strategy couples crude blending model rigorous crude processing model and is implemented in Aspen Hysys simulation package, such that it can simultaneously take into account concerns of production profitability, energy saving, and emission reduction. The development will provide technical support for optimal crude oil blending and processing in petroleum refineries. The efficacy of the methodology is demonstrated by a real case study.