The economic potentials of Malaysian oil palm empty fruit bunch are realized by several motivating factors such as abundance, cheapness and are generally feasible to produce multi-products that range from energy, chemicals and materials. Amid continuing supports from the government in terms of policies, strategies and funding, manufacturing planning and decision to utilize this biomass resource requires a decision-support tool. In this regard, biomass supply chain modeling serves as the supportive tool and can provide economic indications for guided future investments. Sequential steps in modeling and optimization of the supply chain that utilized empty fruit bunch were shown. In a form of superstructure, the supply chain consisted processing stages for converting the biomass into intermediates and products, transportation networks that used truck, train or pipeline, and the options for product's direct sales or for further refinements. The developed optimization model has considered biomass cost, production costs, transportation costs, and emission treatment costs from transportation and production activities in order to determine the annual profit. By taking a case study of Peninsula Malaysia, optimal value showed a profit of $ 713,642,269/y could be achieved which has assumed a single ownership for all of the facilities in the supply chain. Besides, the tabulated values of yields and emission levels could provide comparative analysis between the processing routes. Sensitivity analysis was then performed to perturb the approximated parameters or data that have been used in this study.
KeywordsEmpty fruit bunch (EFB); palm oil industry; biomass supply chain optimization; superstructure; bioproducts.
Highlights• Malaysia is to value the potentials of oil palm's biomass-based industries.• EFB has obvious advantages and could be utilized for manufacturing products.
We present a model-based optimization
approach to determine the configuration of a petroleum refinery for
grassroots (new) or existing site that considers a large number of
commercial technologies particularly for heavy oil processing of crude
oil residue from an atmospheric distillation unit. First, we develop
a superstructure representation for the refinery configuration to
encompass all possible topology alternatives comprising 96 technologies
and their interconnectivities. The superstructure is postulated by
decomposing it to incorporate representative heavy oil processing
scheme alternatives that center on the technologies for atmospheric
residual hydrodesulfurization (ARDS), vacuum residual hydrodesulfurization
(VRDS), and residual fluid catalytic cracking (RFCC). We formulate
a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) based on the superstructure
by devising logic propositions on design and structural specifications
that represent these processing options to aid convergence to an optimal
refinery configuration. A numerical example is illustrated to implement
the proposed technique in which an equivalent of more than two million
refinery plot plans is evaluated. To assess the applicability and
value of the approach, we validate the results against the literature
as well as compare with existing real-world refinery configurations.
A main contribution of this work is to demonstrate how a mixed-integer
programming approach can be applied to a large-scale petroleum refinery
design problem with suitable approximations informed by practical
considerations to obtain results with reasonable computational load.
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