Solid Waste Management in Petroleum Refineries

Abstract

Waste management became focus of attention of many researchers and scientists in the last half century due to its vital importance. Waste management covered waste source reduction in general, by recycling, reusing, composting, incineration with or without energy recovery, fuel production and land filling. A common approach of waste management models were for specific problems with a limited scope (like assignment of generating sources to landfills, transfer stations sitting, site selection for landfills, etc.). Integrated models have been developed more recently. The latest dynamic network flow models with nonlinear costs for waste management used multi-objective mixed integer programming approach for the management of existing facilities in an industrial complex waste management system. The application of multi-objective mixed integer programming techniques was for reasoning the potential conflict between environmental and economic goals and for evaluating sustainable strategies for waste management. Material recycling exhibited huge indirect benefits in an economic sense, although the emphasis of environmental quality as one of the objectives in decision-making has been inevitably driven the optimal solution toward pro-recycling programs. The enhancement of this modeling analysis by using the grey and fuzzy system theories as uncertainty analysis tools could prove highly beneficial. A multi-objective optimization model based on the goal programming approach was applied for proper management of solid waste generated by the petroleum industries in the state of Kuwait. The analytic hierarchy process, a decision-making approach, incorporating qualitative and quantitative aspects of a problem, has been incorporated in the model to prioritize the conflicting goals usually encountered when addressing the waste management problems of the petroleum industries. An optimization model was formulated based on the goal programming technique to minimize the set of deviations from pre-specified multiple goals, which were considered simultaneously but were weighted according to their relative importance. Ten years of solid waste data have been collected from local petroleum industries and processed with different treatment options with economical constraints to provide the best possible solution to be implemented for the specified objectives to be accomplished.