Carbon intensity of global crude oil refining and mitigation potential

Liang Jing, Hassan M. El-Houjeiri, Jean-Christophe Monfort, Adam R. Brandt, Mohammad S. Masnadi, Deborah Gordon and Joule A. Bergerson ()
Additional contact information
Liang Jing: University of Calgary
Hassan M. El-Houjeiri: Climate and Sustainability Group, Aramco Research Center–Detroit, Aramco Services Company
Jean-Christophe Monfort: Climate and Sustainability Group, Aramco Research Center–Detroit, Aramco Services Company
Adam R. Brandt: Stanford University
Mohammad S. Masnadi: University of Pittsburgh
Deborah Gordon: Brown University
Joule A. Bergerson: University of Calgary

Nature Climate Change, 2020, vol. 10, issue 6, 526-532

Abstract: Abstract Changing market demand and increasing environmental regulations challenge the refining industry to shift crude slates and reconfigure production processes while reducing emissions. Yet sellers and buyers remain unaware of the carbon footprint of individual marketable networks, and each crude oil has different specifications and is processed in different destination markets. Here we show the global refining carbon intensity at country level and crude level are 13.9–62.1 kg of CO2-equivalent (CO2e) per barrel and 10.1–72.1 kgCO2e per barrel, respectively, with a volume-weighted average of 40.7 kgCO2e per barrel (equivalent to 7.3 gCO2e MJ−1) and energy use of 606 MJ per barrel. We used bottom-up engineering-based refinery modelling on crude oils representing 93% of 2015 global refining throughput. On the basis of projected oil consumption under 2 °C scenarios, the industry could save 56–79 GtCO2e to 2100 by targeting primary emission sources. These results provide guidance on climate-sensitive refining choices and future investment in emissions mitigation technologies.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0775-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:nat:natcli:v:10:y:2020:i:6:d:10.1038_s41558-020-0775-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nclimate/

DOI: 10.1038/s41558-020-0775-3

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Climate Change is currently edited by Bronwyn Wake

More articles in Nature Climate Change from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().