Petroleum refining process control and real-time optimization

With tighter emission requirements on fuels and the changing world supply of crude oil, more detailed methods for characterizing refinery feed and product streams are needed to make the complicated decisions required to control and optimize refinery operations. Changes in analytical measurement technology provide additional data for fingerprinting the molecular structure of these hydrocarbon mixtures. Integrating this molecular characterization of the materials with advances in compositional modeling methods, model reduction techniques, optimization, and equation-solving methods, along with continued implementation of model predictive control, improves operational effectiveness at all levels of the refinery from the individual process level to the refinery-wide planning optimization. The examples presented highlight progress toward capturing the highest value of every molecule at every point in the refining complex