Economic and environmental co-benefit of natural gas supply chain considering the risk attitude of designers

Abstract

Nature gas plays a fundamental role in promoting cleaner production worldwide. Given this, evaluation of the natural gas supply chain from the perspective of both economic and environmental-friendly should be considered simultaneously while proposing a comprehensive estimation model remain a challenge in the performance improving study. What’s more, the inherent uncertainty and strong variation associated with natural gas demand attach difficulty in precise analysis and make an impact on the stable gas supply. This paper proposes an integrated mathematical model to estimate the economic and environmental (2-E) performance, where multiple natural gas products and transportation modes are considered in economic section, and the major carbon emission from upstream production to downstream users are given in the environmental part. An index is formulated to indicate the supply risk caused by the uncertain gas demand. Considering the risk attitude of supply chain designers may have a significant impact on the final 2-E performance, three scenarios namely Risk Neutral Scenario, Risk Aversion Scenario, and Risk-taking Scenario are applied to quantify the impact. The case study result demonstrates that 1) In comparison to the neutral scenario model which is commonly used in the literature, the annual economic profits and total carbon dioxide emission in this paper have a 6.78 million CNY and 2.06 kiloton variation, respectively. 2) The pipeline layout and location of functional stations are coincident within three scenarios, while the detailed transportation scheme in the operation period changed a lot. 3) The reliability varies from 99.88% to 89.37% within three scenarios, and the supply chain designers can make a tradeoff between the 2-E performance and supply risk according to the proposed relationship between theme.