Insight into the Sustainable Integration of Bio- and Petroleum Refineries for the Production of Fuels and Chemicals

Abstract

A petroleum refinery heavily depends on crude oil as its main feedstock to produce liquid fuels and chemicals. In the long term, this unyielding dependency is threatened by the depletion of the crude oil reserve. However, in the short term, its price highly fluctuates due to various factors, such as regional and global security instability causing additional complexity on refinery production planning. The petroleum refining industries are also drawing criticism and pressure due to their direct and indirect impacts on the environment. The exhaust gas emission of automobiles apart from the industrial and power plant emission has been viewed as the cause of global warming. In this sense, there is a need for a feasible, sustainable, and environmentally friendly generation process of fuels and chemicals. The attention turns to the utilization of biomass as a potential feedstock to produce substitutes for petroleum-derived fuels and building blocks for biochemicals. Biomass is abundant and currently is still low in utilization. The biorefinery, a facility to convert biomass into biofuels and biochemicals, is still lacking in competitiveness to a petroleum refinery. An attractive solution that addresses both is by the integration of bio- and petroleum refineries. In this context, the right decision making in the process selection and technologies can lower the investment and operational costs and assure optimum yield. Process optimization based on mathematical programming has been extensively used to conduct techno-economic and sustainability analysis for bio-, petroleum, and the integration of both refineries. This paper provides insights into the context of crude oil and biomass as potential refinery feedstocks. The current optimization status of either bio- or petroleum refineries and their integration is reviewed with the focus on the methods to solve the multi-objective optimization problems. Internal and external uncertain parameters are important aspects in process optimization. The nature of these uncertain parameters and their representation methods in process optimization are also discussed.

Improving the Glucose to Fructose Isomerization via Epitaxial‐Grafting of Niobium in UIO‐66 Framework

“…Petroleum refinery has been impressive for the last several decades because it provides almost all chemicals and valuable fuels to meet global demand [1–2] . These chemicals and fuels are derived from the three classes of petroleum refined products, olefins, saturated hydrocarbons, and aromatics [3–4] .…”

“…Petroleum refinery has been impressive for the last several decades because it provides almost all chemicals and valuable fuels to meet global demand. [1][2] These chemicals and fuels are derived from the three classes of petroleum refined products, olefins, saturated hydrocarbons, and aromatics. [3][4] However, the excessive use of fossil-fuel derived petrochemicals poses a severe threat to the environment due to releasing a large quantity of global warming CO 2 .…”

A multi-functional porous cobalt catalyst for the selective hydrogenative ring-opening and rearrangement of furfural to cyclopentanol

“…To improve the competitiveness of biomass resources against fossil resources, the development of simple and low-cost platform molecule preparation processes and new methods for efficient conversion of platform molecules into fuels and chemicals are important means. 1 Biomass-derived furfural (FFA), easily obtained from the dehydration of pentose sugars, is already commercially available at low prices. 2 It is considered one of the most important platform compounds that can be subsequently converted into a wide range of high-value chemicals such as furfuryl alcohol (FOL), tetrahydrofuran alcohol (THFOL), furoic acid, 2-methylfuran (2-MF), 2-methyltetrahydrofuran (2-MTHF), levulinic acid, valerolactone, cyclopentanone (CPO) and cyclopentanol (CPL).…”

Catalytic Transformation of Biomass-Derived Furfurals to Cyclopentanones and Their Derivatives: A Review

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