Overall integration of the management of h ₂ and co ₂ within refinery planning using rigorous process models

New CO ₂ legislation forces the petroleum refining industry to review its operations and processes to cope with the new limitations of allowable CO ₂ emissions. Simultaneously, petroleum refineries, which are extremely complex entities, face another challenge represented by clean fuel products (low sulfur content) regulations. In an attempt to provide operational solutions to these issues, a CO ₂ management model was incorporated with an existing hydrogen management model that we have recently developed. To this end, this article presents an overall integrated model that solves simultaneously the refinery planning, hydrogen, and CO ₂ management problems. It addresses the optimum CO ₂ strategy selection through integration of refinery planning with the hydrogen network and CO ₂ emissions. The overall model was formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear program (MINLP). The model consists of the refinery emission sources and the considered mitigation options. Model performance was tested through different case studies with various reduction targets. The optimization results showed that the integration of the planning, hydrogen, and CO ₂ models lead to better profit margins and that CO ₂ mitigation options worked successfully together to meet a given reduction target. The obtained results also showed that the load shifting option can contribute up to a 3% reduction of CO ₂ emissions, while the fuel switching option can provide a 20% reduction. To achieve greater than 30% reductions, a CO ₂ capture technology must be employed in the petroleum refining industry.