A Decision-Making Framework for Incorporating Economic and Environmental Factors in the Low Carbon-Oriented Design of Pipelines

Abstract Pipelines are the main transportation mode of oil products, as well as the potential transportation mode of biofuel. The rational design of pipelines determines the efficiency, economy and sustainability of pipeline scheduling in the future. In the past, the research on the optimal design of multi-product pipelines has primarily focused on the construction cost, while seldom considered the impact of carbon emissions on the environment over the pipeline lifespan and the influence of resulting carbon taxes on design schemes. With the growing awareness of environmental protection, the total carbon emissions during the pipeline life and the corresponding carbon taxes have become focal points in pipeline design. Moreover, most of previous work only focused on the pipeline parameters while ignoring the integrated optimization of batch volume and batch numbers, which strongly affect economic cost and carbon emissions during a pipe life cycle. To avoid these drawbacks, a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is proposed to minimize the total economic cost and carbon taxes in the pipeline life simultaneously. To make it closer to reality, we account for actual process and technical constraints that include pipe construction, pump stations layout, pipeline hydraulic, batch volume and number, and distribution technology of delivery station. Finally, based on the forecast demand of refined products in a certain region of China, the model is successfully applied to a real multi-product pipeline in China. The applicability and sensitivity analysis of the model is illustrated in the case. The results show that the model can get a series of schemes for decision-makers to select in short time, and minimize the pipeline construction cost and the impact of carbon emissions on the environment.