An automated environmental and economic evaluation methodology for the optimization of a sour water stripping plant

In this work a real sour stripping plant of a petrochemical complex simulated in AspenHysys® is improved using an automated tool programmed in Matlab®. The new developed procedure provides the performance evaluation and the comparison between different alternatives of the plant through the calculation and aggregation of environmental and economic indicators. The results obtained give insights into the plant environmental behavior, being very useful to find the suitable modifications in operation and topology of the plant. Moreover, the use of this tool allows the implementation of optimization algorithms and heat integration strategies, with the aim of minimizing resources consumption, pollutants releases, energy requirements and total costs. Specifically, the procedure helps to significantly improve the performance of the studied process: the operating costs are reduced near 8%, while the amount of released CO2-eq is 7% lower, and the process consumes 66% less water.