Integration of Refinery Hydrogen Network

Strict environmental regulations on sulfur and aromatics content of fuels force refineries to use hydrogen with higher quality. Therefore, hydrogen management has become vital in today’s refinery operations. In current methods for hydrogen management, hydrogen plant (typically steam reformer) is considered as an external utility. Therefore, it is impossible to exploit the potential advantage of PSA unit (or any other purification unit) embedded in hydrogen plant. In this paper, a new approach for integration of refinery hydrogen network is developed, which considers the hydrogen plant as part of hydrogen network. A mathematical optimization method is applied for modeling of the superstructure, which is based on non-linear programming. In this approach, either the plant operating cost or plant total annulized cost can be minimized as objective function. In order to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a case study from the literature is investigated. Having incorporated the hydrogen plant as part of the hydrogen network, more cost effective solution is achieved, as compared to those reported in literature.