Integrated substance and energy flow analysis towards CO2 emission evaluation of gasoline & diesel production in Chinese fuel-refinery

In China, energy production in fuel refineries has a major problem: high emission of CO2. The conventional method of CO2 emission evaluation is based on substances flow analysis (SFA), which focuses on the cost control. However, as the importance of low carbon development in fuel refineries increases, CO2 emissions control has become the main objective of evaluation. Moreover, it would be difficult for application of SFA to estimate CO2 emission accurately because of the indirect CO2 emissions in energy consumption that are ignored in SFA. In this study, a CO2 emission evaluation method that combines SFA with energy flow analysis (EFA) is established. This method is applied to a Chinese fuel refinery, and the results indicated that the quantity of CO2 emission evaluated by combined SFA and EFA was about 14.40% higher than emissions evaluated only by SFA. Also, the impacts of substance flow and energy flow on carbon dioxide emissions were analyzed, and some suitable suggestions are proposed for the low carbon development of the fuel-refinery.