Abstract
The assessment of life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of motor fuels is important due to the legal obligations and corporate social responsibility of the petroleum industry. Combining the Life-Cycle Assessment with optimization methods can provide valuable support in the decision-making process. In this paper, a mathematical model of a refinery was developed to analyze the impact of process optimization on GHG emissions at the fuel production stage. The model included ten major refinery units. Fuel production costs were minimized by taking into account the number of constraints. The analysis was performed in two steps. First, the model was run for the reference case of fuels composition. Then, more than twelve thousand model runs were performed. In each model, the fuel composition was changed. This change represented the exogenous pressures and resulted in different flows of mass, energy and GHG emission at the refinery. The most favorable results in terms of GHG emissions were then identified and analyzed. Additionally, the impact of using low-carbon fuels for process heating was evaluated. The study showed that fuel blending management could lead to the reduction of GHG emissions by 0.4 gCO2-eq/MJ while the use of low-carbon fuel for process heating results in a reduction of GHG emissions by 2 ca. gCO2-eq/MJ.
Highlights
Crude oil is the basic raw material for the production of motor fuels, as well as other products necessary to meet economic needs
This paper describes the mathematical optimization model developed for managing the GHG emission over the life cycle of motor fuels
The modeling work started with the analysis of the reference case for the refinery
Summary
Crude oil is the basic raw material for the production of motor fuels, as well as other products necessary to meet economic needs. Motor fuels are composed of crude oil fractions processed in refinery installations, biofuel and additives, which are added so they can meet the specific quality requirements. Continuous improvements in energy efficiency of technological process, as well as economic considerations and increased quality requirements for petroleum products are forcing deeper processing of crude oil. Increasing crude oil processing requires more energy, which generates increased GHG emissions. The obligation to reduce GHG emission, according to the legislation [6,7,8] is imposed on fuel suppliers, i.e., refineries which are managing only one of the stages in the life cycle. The calculations carried out within the framework of this work focus only on feasible pathways of GHG emission reduction for the refinery stage
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