
5
Global Crude Oil Renery Models: Parametric and Nonparametric Methods
Crude oil reneries produce nished
petroleum products through a series of
processing steps known as renery unit
operations. The varieties and capacities of process
units, along with their operational characteristics,
differentiate one renery from another. Over the
years, the rening industry has adopted various
metrics to categorize reneries based on their
capital investment and upgrading capability.
These efforts have resulted in renery complexity
indicators such as the equivalent distillation
capacity, the Nelson complexity index and the
bottom of the barrel index (Kaiser 2017, Ogjresearch
2022). Although these metrics have helped quantify
the renery complexity and suitability for various
crude oil feed qualities, they fail to provide relevant
information for renery modeling applications
(Herce, Martini et al. 2022).
Renery models are essential for assessing the
economic and energy performance of reneries
and potentially exploiting opportunities to optimize
protability, efciency, and policy compliance.
From a process design perspective, these models
facilitate the development of optimal renery
congurations under prevailing operating and
logistical conditions in local and/or regional
markets. Business and government policymakers
draw insights from modeling and analysis for
investment selection, downstream diversication
and regulatory policy design and compliance.
Identifying the fundamental renery conguration
is crucial for realizing reliable and deployable
renery models.
Abella, Motazedi et al. (2015) used a predominantly
North American database to identify 10 unique
renery congurations for model development. Their
conguration-based modeling approach enabled
the deployment of models for estimating renery
energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG)
emissions. Doing so aided the identication and
exploration of efciency improvements and emission
reduction opportunities (Motazedi, Abella et al.
2017). Such models are also useful for assessing
crude feed blends and renery conguration options
to maximize the netback (Nduagu, Umeozor et al.
2018). They have also been extended to quantify
the environmental impact of the renery life cycle
(Young, Hottle et al. 2019). However, for the effective
application of conguration-based modeling, the
accurate identication of rening process units and
their attributes is crucial.
In 2020, there were 867 global crude oil reneries
with active capacities of 103.32 million barrels
per day (MMb/d), of which approximately 80%
were located outside North America (Platts 2022).
Identifying the unique congurations across
the global crude oil rening landscape would
facilitate individual, national, regional, and global
renery modeling. Such modeling could promote
various application studies related to, for example,
efciency improvement, emission reduction, policy
design, netback optimization, and investment
competitiveness analysis. The rest of this paper is
organized as follows: global renery classication
into design congurations is presented in the next
section. In section 3, modeling methods and the
data for both the parametric and nonparametric
modeling of renery congurations are presented.
The modeling results are presented in section 4, and
the conclusions and further research opportunities
are discussed in section 5.
1. Introduction