Future scenario of China’s downstream oil supply chain: Low carbon-oriented optimization for the design of planned multi-product pipelines

With the increasing demand of refined products and growing concern about carbon emissions, the planned multi-product pipelines, serving as the primary way of refined products transportation, should be designed reasonably, economically, and low carbon-oriented so that the sustainable and environmentally friendly production and the rational construction of downstream oil supply chain can be achieved. Aiming at this issue, a multi-objective mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is proposed to minimize the total economic costs and CO2 emission simultaneously. Various actual process and technical constraints including pipeline construction, pump stations layout, pipeline hydraulic and pumps configurations are considered in the model. Based on the augmented ε-constraint method, the conflicting objectives are dealt with and the Pareto front can be get. Finally, based on a predicted future scenario of regional refined products demand, the proposed model was successfully applied to a real-word planned multi-product pipeline in China. Two cases are given to demonstrate the model’s applicability and the influence of CO2 emission objective on the pipeline design scheme determination. Meanwhile, the trade-off between the two objectives was analyzed in detail.