Dealing with uncertainties: Sensitivity analysis of vacuum gas oil hydrotreatment

•Main problem: how to quantify uncertainties in model prediction.•Sobol index to quantify relationship between inputs and output.•Sobol index to estimate non influent inputs.•Sobol index shows strong impact of resins and low impact of ppH2S.•We apply Sobol indexes to HDN and HDS reactions. This work applies sensitivity analysis to a kinetic model of hydrotreating processes. The proposed approach is subdivided into several steps: The first step is to build the kinetic model. The second step is to develop a simplified model (meta model) on which easy calculations can be performed in the next step. The third step is to use the meta model to estimate the influence of each input on the model output without Monte Carlo methods which are difficult to manage. Sensitivity analyses are very useful for model comparison and uncertainties estimation.