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.