A Typical Case Study: Solid Waste Management in Petroleum Refineries

Abstract

The current environmental concerns have forced developed and developing countries to reduce air, water and land pollution for sustainable growth. Solid refinery waste is cocktail of hydrocarbons, water, heavy metal and fine solids and is substantial in quantity. The principal processes of waste management focus mainly on waste source reduction, reusing, recycling, composting, incineration with or without energy recovery, fuel production and land filling. Waste management models have a common approach of assignment of generating sources to landfills, transfer stations sitting, site selection for landfills, etc. but recently new integrated models have been developed and applied. Waste management system in an industrial complexes uses multi-objective mixed integer programming approach for the running of existing facilities in dynamic net work flow models with nonlinear costs of management. The latest multi-objective mixed integer programming techniques are applied to resolve the potential conflict between environmental and economic goals and to evaluate sustainable strategies for waste management. In this approach, material recycling in an economic sense exhibits huge indirect benefits, although the emphasis of environmental quality as a major objective in decision-making drives the optimal solution toward pro-recycling programs. The use of grey and fuzzy system theories as uncertainty analysis tools as an enhancement of this modeling analysis proves to be highly profitable. A multi-objective optimization model based on the goal programming approach has been developed and tested in this study for passable management of solid waste generated by a typical petroleum refining industry in the state of Kuwait. The analytic hierarchy process, a decision-making approach, including qualitative and quantitative aspects of a problem, has been integrated in the model to prioritize the conflicting goals existing in the waste management problems of the petroleum industries. The optimization model is developed based on the goal programming technique that attempts to minimize the set of deviations from pre-specified multiple goals, which are considered simultaneously but are weighted according to their relative importance. A set of data from local petroleum refining industries is obtained and is analyzed using the unique presently developed multi-objective optimization model based on goal programming technique with all treatment options and economic constraints. The successful application of this model has provided the most economically viable solution to be applied for the specified objectives to be accomplished for the management of solid waste generated from petroleum industries.