Abstract
The design and planning of an integrated ethanol and gasoline supply chain is addressed, and is composed of harvesting and production sites for ethanol, petroleum refineries, distribution centers where blending takes place, and the retail gas stations where blends of gasoline and ethanol are sold. We postulate a superstructure that combines all the components of the supply chain and different means of transportation, and model this multiscale design problem as a multiperiod MILP model. In order to identify regions where investments are needed and the optimal configuration of the network, a strategic planning model is considered in which gasoline stations are aggregated in different regions. A detailed formulation is considered where regions are disaggregated into gas stations to determine the retrofit projects for the selection of blending pumps over their expected life. Also, the application of these MILP models with two large‐scale problems are illustrated. © 2013 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 59: 4655–4672, 2013
Highlights
During the last decade the increasing concern on limited fossil fuels and environmental issues has brought attention to ethanol as a major energy source from biomass
Our model considers that the lowest ethanol blend at retail centers should be E10, which is currently the gasoline that is sold in most of the US gas stations.Retail centers represent a group of gas stations, where every fuel blend can be fed and stored in underground tanks.Some gas stations sell only the fuel blends they receive while others can blend the fuels stored in their underground tanks to producealternative blends using blending pumps operated by theconsumers
The inventory balance for the product (E85) is represented in Eq (7), where the amount of E85 produced in plant j with production technology q in time period t plus the amount stored at the end of the previous time period must be equal to the amount transported from ethanol plant jto distribution center k, and other markets of ethanol consumption fby transportation mode min time period t(qpJKjkmpt and qpJFfjmpt respectively), plus the amount that remains stored at the end of time period t.Eq (8) shows thepercentage of ethanol ( j)devoted to the consumption of other industries
Summary
During the last decade the increasing concern on limited fossil fuels and environmental issues has brought attention to ethanol as a major energy source from biomass. The integration of ethanol and gasoline has been studiedby Russell et al(2009) who focusonthe logistics management process, railway transportation and intermediate storage These authors propose the inclusion of intermediate hub storage to better complement railway transportation, the building of strategic relationships among petroleum distribution centers, ethanol producers and transportation providers. Iyer and Grossmann (1998) address the Long-Range Planning with a Bilevel Decomposition Algorithm where the higher level problem determines the processes that should be selected and the capacity and production planning are determined at the lower level problem Since the former provides an upper bound for the profit and the latter a lower bound, these sub problems are solved iteratively by adding cuts until the bounds are within a given tolerance. The decomposition algorithm and results for the detailed model are discussed in the supplementary material
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