Economic, energy-saving and carbon-abatement potential forecast of multiproduct pipelines: A case study in China

Multiproduct pipelines play an important role in linking the upstream and downstream ends of the petroleum industry. Promoting energy conservation and carbon abatement in a multiproduct pipeline is imperative to the entire petroleum industry in China to move toward sustainable and cleaner production. This paper studies the promotion of technical progress on the operation of a multiproduct pipeline under policy control in terms of economic, energy-saving and carbon abatement potential (EECP) from a long-term perspective, which fills a gap in the reference literature. A complete bottom-up framework for detailed calculations of energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions for four categories of energy saving technical measures is proposed, including pipeline scheduling, transmix treatment, pressure loss control and a leak detection system. Three scenarios are applied to forecast the regional demand of the pipeline in response to different low-carbon policy contexts, and a stepwise multiple linear regression is used to realize the forecast of prices of oil products under the regulation of government. To demonstrate the proposed method, a real multiproduct pipeline in the Zhejiang Province, China is used as an example. The results show that two-thirds of selected technical measures are economically feasible. The forecasted EECP of the studied multiproduct pipeline is rather significant, with the NPV, energy-saving potential and carbon-abatement potential being 198.32 million CNY, 60.25% and 49.57% from 2016 to 2050, respectively. The proposed method is not case-specific and can be used for any multiproduct pipeline in China. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.