Allocation of CO2 emissions in petroleum refineries to petroleum joint products: A linear programming model for practical application

The allocation of CO2 emissions associated with petroleum refineries to petroleum joint products is a necessary step in Well-to-Tank analysis in order to evaluate the environmental impacts of individual automotive fuels. Oil refining is essentially a joint production system and due to the complex nature of the process involved, it is very difficult to establish any noncontroversial allocation pattern for oil products. Under certain conditions, however, refinery linear programming models can provide a non-arbitrary additive allocation schema based on the marginal contribution of each oil product to the total CO2 emissions. But in general, these conditions are not satisfied.In this paper, by extending the LP approach to the optimal Simplex tableau, we propose an original two-stage methodology based on the marginal contribution of oil products and the production elasticity of unit processes to provide an additive CO2 allocation scheme. We show that this procedure emerges from the equilibrium behavior of the refinery and is consistent with microeconomic theory. A numerical example is provided.