E3 Analysis for Crude and Vacuum Distillation System

Crude oil blending is a very common practice in petroleum refineries, where the main focus is to minimize the total purchase cost of crude oils under specified blending oil properties. Crude oil blending actually has significant impacts on energy consumption from heating furnaces during crude oil processing. Conceivably, furnace energy consumption from burning fuels such as natural gas, fuel oil, or propane causes huge amounts of CO2 emissions. In this paper, a methodology framework for crude oil blending and processing with simultaneous consideration of energy, emission, and economic profit (E3) is developed. It includes four stages of work: steady-state modeling, heating energy consumption calculation, emission model development, and economic evaluation. With Aspen HYSYS simulation, the developed methodology provides a quantitative support for refinery to identify an optimal E3 operating strategy. A case study is implemented to demonstrate the efficacy of this methodology.