A mathematical programming approach to reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the petroleum refining industry

摘要

While fossil fuels supplied around 90% of the developed world's energy in 2008, the resulting CO2 emissions took a tremendous toll on the environment. As power plants, factories, and oil refineries are the largest CO2 emitters, it is vital to find greener ways to extract, refine and utilize fossil fuels. In this paper, we introduce a nonlinear mixed-integer programming model which is intended to help decision makers evaluate the operational cost of different alternatives for reducing CO2 emissions at petroleum refineries such as powering the refineries using renewable energy sources. To validate our model, we solve several small-size instances of the problem using the BARON solver in GAMS.