NEW TECHNIQUES FOR MEETING NEW PRODUCT SPEC AND DEMAND UNDERCATASTROPHIC FAILURE THROUGH MULTI OBJECTIVE MULTI REFINERYOPTIMIZATION

摘要

With the political instability and increased risk of war and terrorist attacks in whichrefineries and fuel transportation grids are possible targets, pressures are exerted onrefiners to explore new techniques to meet product demand under the case of partial ortotal failure of a refinery or multi refineries system. Since we are assuming a sudden failureor a need to promptly meet a new product spec, thus major upgrading of refineries is not anoption but the option is to optimize the operations and the process streams within a refineryand intra refineries in order to produce salable products meeting the required product spec.A provision of importing high quality steams intended for sell at international markets wasallowed with constraints. Simulation runs were carried out using ASPEN PIMS utilizingnonlinear techniques to solve the optimization problem. The results addressed the need todebottleneck some refineries or transportation media to meet the demand for essentialproducts under partial or total failure scenarios. They also addressed the benefits ofimporting high spec products to help recover some of the losses and what is needed inorder to accomplish this. In addition, the results showed nonlinear relations with the globalobjective for some refineries. In addition, crude processing capacity has more effect onproducts supply than the treating and upgrading capacity.