Refining operations: Energy consumption and emission

The Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) was performed on various refinery processing units. The LCA divided the refinery operation into four stages: feedstock preparation, processing, transportation, and endproduct utilization. Various refinery process flowsheets were considered, which comprising of four commonly used refinery processing units were considered: atmospheric and vacuum distillation unit (AVDU), fluid catalytic cracking unit (FCCU), delayed coking unit (DCU), and hydrocracking unit (HCU). The results indicated that processing refinery intermediate products resulted in the highest energy consumption and emissions among other LCA factors. This suggests that the refineries should reduce the number of processing steps to reduce operating costs and environmental impacts. The FCC unit had the highest energy consumption and emissions among other processing units. The combined AVDU-HC-FCCU process flowsheets had the highest energy consumption and emissions among other process flowsheets.