| Abstract
| - The petroleum refining industry plays a very important role in international economics and in our daily life.The world refining capacity has increased rapidly during the past decade, and this makes operation planning,scheduling, and general optimization become important tools for the refinery industry. However, environmentalregulations and risks of climate change are pressuring the refinery industry to minimize its greenhouse gasemissions. In this research, a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model is proposed for theproduction planning of refinery processes to achieve maximum operational profit while reducing CO2 emissionsto a given target through the use of different CO2 mitigation options. The options considered in this study areflow-rate balancing (decreasing the inlet flow rate to a unit that emits more CO2), fuel switching (changes ina certain operation to run with a different fuel that emits less CO2 emissions, such as natural gas), and installationof a CO2 capture process (e.g., the monoethanolamine (MEA) process). The objective of the MINLP modelis to determine suitable CO2 mitigation options for a given reduction target while meeting the demand ofeach final product and its quality specifications, while simultaneously maximizing profit. In this study, aglobal optimization algorithm is used on the different case studies considered.
|
