Risk management for hydrogen networks across refineries

Abstract Stricter environmental regulations and policies are leading to increasing requirements for the quality of the oil product. Hydrogen fluctuation in the hydrofining process of refineries remains a considerable problem that may affect the quality of refinery products and increase operating costs. As hydrogen supply across multiple refineries is common in the process industry, the optimal design of interplant hydrogen networks (multi-refinery hydrogen networks) is inevitable in improving the stability of hydrogen supply and reducing the utility consumption of the entire system. This paper introduces the Worst-Case Conditional Value at Risk (WCVaR) concept for the synthesis of the interplant hydrogen network system with hydrogen source flowrate fluctuations. WCVaR is adopted to indicate the expected value of the pure hydrogen content in hydrogen networks in the worst case. Considering the adjustability of hydrogen utility in the realistic production process, this paper studies the stability of interplant hydrogen networks under constant and adjustable hydrogen utilities. The Monte Carlo simulation verifies that the multi-refinery hydrogen network structures obtained by this method are more robust.