A novel Metric of Sustainability for petroleum refinery projects

作者：Hasheminasab Hamidreza^*; Gholipour Yaghob; Kharrazi Mohammadreza; Streimikiene Dalia

来源：Journal of Cleaner Production, 2018, 171: 1215-1224.

DOI：10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.09.223

• Sustainable development
• Petroleum refinery
• Indicator frameworks
• Metric of Sustainability
• Energy infrastructure projects

Infrastructure projects will continue to be developed in the coming years, particularly in developing countries such as Iran. These projects can have major impacts on all three pillars of sustainability, i.e. social, economic, and environmental. Among these projects, energy as well as oil & gas projects can have an even bigger impact on all three pillars, in terms of magnitude and severity of the consequences. As such, energy and oil & gas projects are not only important from political and strategic point of view, but they are also of major significance when it comes to principles of sustainability. Therefore, it is important to introduce methods and solutions to improve the level of sustainability at which such facilities are designed, constructed, and operated. Although existing studies have suggested various methods to implement sustainable development principles in infrastructure projects, effective assessment of sustainability and proper definition of its indicators are scarce in this industry in general. Among oil & gas projects, Petroleum Refinery Industry (PRI) projects lack a reliable sustainability assessment system, although in practical terms, many elements of sustainability are incorporated in refineries nowadays.
This research aims to develop a sustainability assessment framework including proper indicators for such an assessment. This framework can serve as a reference for future research in PRI projects. Sustainability indicators in all three pillars of sustainability are consolidated and structured under the proposed framework, which is designed to deal with the complicated makeup and operation of oil refinery projects. This article presents a novel Metric of Sustainability (MOS), which can help the decision makers, most notably strategic managers, to properly set up the process for design, construction, and operation of new refinery projects or audit and appraise the operating ones.
Based on the proposed framework and the resulting MOS, a real refinery project is assessed according to the available data and required accuracy. The outputs are then presented in Fig. 3 for discussion. The results of this case study show that the environmental concerns are the most important issue in distillation units. Also, GHG emissions in the operating phase have the most adverse effect on the sustainability profile of the case refinery.

• 出版日期2018-1-10