Integration of CO2 management within oil refinery planning

This paper proposes a MINLP model for optimizing an oil refinery planning process. The objective function of the model is to maximize the profit. The targeted unit processes in this study are Atmospheric Distillation Unit (ADU), Vacuum Distillation Unit (VDU), Reformer unit, Hydrocrackers, Fluid Catalytic Cracker (FCC) and Hydrogen Plant. The cases studied incorporated CO2 emissions as constrain to production and a fuel switching effect on the cost of production. Three cases are developed. The base case is modelled to optimize the plan without encountering for CO2 emissions; case one introduced the cost for emitting CO2 as a penalty in the objective and in case two, CO2 emission reduction is examined along a step-wise reduction target from 1% to 4% to examine the units on which the fuel switching should be applied. From the base case and case one, the results indicate that the CO2 emission penalty does not reduce the total emission while it reduces the overall profit by 0.17%. In case two, it is shown that applying the step-wise reduction targets has minor influence on the profit. The proposed model has demonstrated the advantage of decoupling profit and CO2 emission while maintaining the same production rate.