(137c) New Approach for Addressing Environmental Effects through Multi Objective Multi Refinery Optimization

Petroleum refining is a capital-intensive business. With stringent environmental regulations on the processing industry and declining refining margins, higher pressures are exerted on refiners to optimize performance and find the best combination of feed and processes to produce salable products that meet stricter product specifications, while at the same time meeting refinery supply commitments and of course making profit. Usually it is hard quantify environmental effects on big refining projects either during the design phase or the operating phase. Methods such as sustainability may not be easy to understand by corporate executives and decision maker in many countries. This work concentrate on finding ways to quantify these effects and the possible way for product specification upgrade and embedding this in a multi refinery optimization model. This is done through multi objective optimization. Most refinery-wide optimization methods do not cover multiple objectives such as minimizing environmental impact, This work starts by carrying out a refinery-wide, single objective optimization, and then it moves to multi objective-single optimization. The last step is multi objective-multi refinery optimization, the objectives of which are analysis of the effects of economic, environmental, product spec, Simulation runs were carried out using both MATLAB and ASPEN PIMS utilizing nonlinear techniques to solve the optimization problem. The results addressed the need to debottleneck some refineries or transportation media in order to meet the demand for essential products