5 replies to this topic

[Nathalie Marie]

Am carrying out a research in the field of Energy Economics and as part of my research I am interested in including the carbon constraint in conventional refinery LP models to evaluation the investment decisions in the contest of the carbon constraint. I am presently at the phase of literature review and would be very grateful if someone could provide me with some reliable titles to read, particularly in areas of application of linear programming to evaluate petroleum refinery projects andC02 management in a refinery projects.

Many hanks

[siretb]

The same post was also in "Industrial Profs..." I deleted that one.
Please post only once. Thank you. Siretb

[Andrei]

Nathalie Marie,

I don't understand the term "carbon constraint". Can you elaborate?
In the last few years I worked in CO2 Capture and Storage (same as CO2 management as you say?) in refineries, power plants, petrochemicals. I may be able to help you if you ask something specific.
There are a million aspects of the issue, please narrow them down.

Andrei

[Nathalie Marie]

Thank you very much for your help.

First of all I would like to mention that I am looking into the carbon constrain from an oil producer perspective.

As you know the decision to invest into the refinery business always involve the combination of factors such as market, margins, location crude types ….. As you may also know, the world oil demand will be generally concentrated on middle distillates and gasoline as well as product quality regulations needing to have very low sulphur content. This evolution implies the use of deep hydrodesulphurization and heavy residue upgrading processes which will generate strong constraints on the hydrogen balance coming from refineries. Furthermore, the growth in world energy demand combined with the level of crude oil prices will call for new developments on unconventional oil reserves, notably for extra heavy crude production, which will require onsite deep pre-refining solutions. The cheapest way of producing hydrogen nowadays is natural gas steam reforming which generates large quantities of CO2.

The introduction of CO2 emissions trading and the additional operating cost this could place on refineries means that refiners now face yet another aspect of their operation they may need to optimize in order to maximize their refinery margin, and hence maximize profitability. So the work am trying to do is to include CO2 constraint into the LP model used by refiners to assess their investments and consider various options to reduce CO2 emissions from their refinery. One of the options that I may be looking at is location refineries close to operating oil field for EOR purposes.

Cheers

Nathalie Marie,

I don't understand the term "carbon constraint". Can you elaborate?
In the last few years I worked in CO2 Capture and Storage (same as CO2 management as you say?) in refineries, power plants, petrochemicals. I may be able to help you if you ask something specific.
There are a million aspects of the issue, please narrow them down.

Andrei

[Zauberberg]

Interesting post... Though it is difficult to discuss about this subject without having any numbers in front of us, I would try to put something more like general comments. I think you should contact refineries/petrochemicals which are faced (almost every single company, nowadays) with this upcoming constraint, and further investigate how this can be modeled within Aspen PIMS environment.

Crude oil slate and (hydro)processing severity ideally should be driven by market demands. However, each refiner is constrained with limitations in crude supply chain, availability of various crudes, existing process unit constraints and overall hydrogen balance. Therefore, CO2 emissions are not the only constraint in ensuring the flexibility of refining company. If you take into account the fact that conducting concept, FEED, DD, erection, comissioning and starting up of high-throughput, high-pressure grassroot plant (such are Hydrocrackers and Hydrotreaters) requires at least 5-10 years, at present time conditions. The bottom line is that CO2 emissions constraint cannot be observed (and incorporated in the model) as completely independent variable - this would have been the case if required time, investment, and crude oil market behavior are predictive. Unfortunately, this is not true.

Each of these process units consumes a lot of energy in MW - which can also be expressed as tonns/day of produced CO2, by fuel gas/oil combustion in process furnaces. I believe steam cracker will produce more CO2 as a consequence of fuel combustion process, than in the process reaction itself. In my opinion, CO2 generated by combustion is by far the most contributive factor to increased emissions.

Wish you good luck in your research,

[NGOI MS M'sia]

Dear Andrei,
i would like to ask about the CO2 removal method suitable to be used in LNG plant...can you provide me some links or informations? the natural gas has composition as below:

Component Mole %

Methane 92.73

Ethane 4.07

Propane 0.77

Isobutane 0.08

n-butane 0.06

Nitrogen 0.45

Carbon dioxide 1.83

Higher Hydrocarbon 0.01

Total 100.00

after removing CO2 from natural gas, how to store or dispose it? as for concern of environmental and global warming effect, CO2 as the green house gas has to be disposed wisely...but how?