A unified benchmark for security and reliability assessment of the integrated chemical plant, natural gas and power transmission networks

Abstract

This work presents a simulation framework to investigate the rigorous transient behavior of integrated systems comprising natural gas and power transmission networks, and a chemical plant whose feedstock is natural gas. This framework entails dynamic models for the gas transmission network and the SynGas plant, and a continuous-time AC-power flow formulation with dispatchable loads. It addresses the following key challenges: (i) analyzing energy and chemical system interdependencies, and their impacts on each other's supply reliability and security; (ii) providing an environment conducive to settling a critical question of how to prioritize the natural gas consumption as fuels of power plants or feedstocks of chemical plants based on sustainability and resiliency criteria. The framework provides an integrated benchmark enabling users to realistically study various planning, scheduling, and operation problems of these integrated systems such as process control, fault diagnosis, optimization, and environmental damage analyses. Effectively coordinating natural gas, power, and chemical industries, the benchmark outclasses conventional energy test problems in analyzing presented reliability and security scenarios since such traditional works solely focused on integrated gas and power systems. Results evidence the effects of nonlinear behavior of chemical plants on reliability and security of both natural gas and power transmission networks, in an integrated manner. Moreover, scenarios on power demand variations, compressor failure occurrences, and gas storage utilizations are enacted; according to the results, the unified benchmark lends insight into crucial information such as spatiotemporal characteristics of disturbances and their propagation throughout the integrated systems and the required period and strategy to damp such disturbances. Such information facilitates reliability and security analyses of the integrated systems and enables the coordination of chemical plants with traditional gas and power networks, particularly in multiple load shedding events which requires supply prioritization of natural gas to power and chemical plants.