Energy, economic and environmental impact analysis of adjusting oil refinery capacity: An interregional optimization approach for resource allocation

As global demand for product oil stabilizes, petrochemical companies are confronted with the challenge of excess product oil capacity. However, due to the intricate nature of the product oil supply chain and the interconnectedness of production, transportation, and sales, quantitatively analyzing refinery capacity poses a challenge. This paper undertakes a quantitative study on the optimization and analysis of oil refinery capacity. A capacity adjustment optimization model is established considering constraints related to production capacity, transportation capacity, transportation routes and mass balance. The model helps to determine the economically optimal refinery capacity adjustment scheme, the corresponding interregional resource allocation and transportation scheme. Taking one of the largest petrochemical companies in China as a case, five scenarios are constructed with varying demand reduction ratios. The results indicate that, compared to the capacity equally distributed scenario, the base adjustment scenario optimized by the model achieves a 3.6 % reduction in transportation turnover, a 5.9 % reduction in energy consumption, and a 6.72 % reduction in CO2 emissions over a one-year cycle, corresponding to reductions of 2 billion t·km, 6 million kgce/a, and 28 ktCO2/a, respectively. The proposed method can help provide policy recommendations for decision-makers in enterprises.