Sustainable design and optimization of co-processing of bio-oil and vacuum gas oil in an existing refinery

Le Wu, Yong Yang, Ting Yan, Yuqi Wang, Lan Zheng, Kun Qian and Furong Hong

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2020, vol. 130, issue C

Abstract: In order to lower the production cost of bio-fuels and add renewable carbon into the fossil fuels, the co-cracking of bio-oil and vacuum gas oil (VGO) has been proposed by utilizing the existing infrastructures in a refinery. The co-processing technique demonstrates an excellent economic viability for its further commercialization. However, the environmental impacts of the co-processing system consisting of the co-processing process and the bio-oil production process remain unclear. In this work, a multi-objective model was built to achieve the optimum biomass raw material and bio-oil production technology by simultaneously minimizing the total cost and the environmental impacts of the co-process system. An investigation was also conducted into the effects of the FCC capability and the bio-oil/VGO feed ratio on the economic and environmental objectives. Two cases were proposed to demonstrate the multi-objective model. The results shown that the optimum biomass raw material and bio-oil production technology were heavily dependent on the objectives. The most efficiency way to reduce total cost was to lower the biomass consumption while the most efficiency way to mitigate the environmental impacts was to decrease the VGO consumption, which is because the impact of the non-renewable raw material remains the most significantly contributory to all the environmental impacts.

Keywords: Multi-objective optimization; Co-processing; Existing refinery; Bio-oil; VGO (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032120302434
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:rensus:v:130:y:2020:i:c:s1364032120302434

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/600126/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 600126/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2020.109952

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews is currently edited by L. Kazmerski

More articles in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().