A dynamic sustainability framework for petroleum refinery projects with a life cycle attitude

Abstract

AbstractFor developing countries, energy infrastructure projects are not only important from a political and strategic point of view, but they are also of major significance in terms of sustainability. Energy infrastructure projects have major impacts on all three pillars of sustainability, that is, social, economic, and environmental. Refinery projects can have an even bigger impact on all three pillars, in terms of magnitude and severity of the consequences. Therefore, it is important to introduce methods and solutions to improve the level of sustainability at which petroleum refinery projects are designed, constructed, and operated. Petroleum refinery projects are multidisciplinary, multiattribute, and multistakeholder projects and decisions in this regard are always difficult to make and unclear about sustainability in the life‐cycle of the project. To deal with these complexities, a dynamic sustainability assessment framework has been proposed in this study. In this framework, different petroleum refinery project's properties such as location, size, functions, stakeholders, products, environmental resiliency, and so on are considered in various life‐cycle phases and are used to come up with a customized framework. Accordingly, a hierarchy of the latest and the most suitable Multiple Criteria Decision Making methodologies are utilized for different decision‐making environments to realize the required dynamicity in these projects. The methods used here are Grey Weighted Aggregated Sum Product Assessment, Fuzzy Evaluation based on Distance from Average Solution, and Combinative Distance‐Based Assessment, each of which are proposed for different decision‐making levels. The proposed methodology is applied to a real petroleum refinery project as a case study. Based on the case study results, the economical pillar gets nearly 50% of the importance based on the project's specific situation. Also, health, atmosphere, and economic performance are the most important indicators among social, environmental, and economic pillars, respectively. At the lowest level, quantitative factors are also ranked and weighted. For instance, the frequency of labors' illness is the highest health factors in the social pillar of sustainability.