Material Flow Based Power Demand Modeling of an Oil Refinery Process for Optimal Energy Management

Oil refining is an energy-intensive industry, that is often equipped with different types of distributed generation (DG) resources. Optimal energy management of the refinery's load and its DG resources, under dynamic electricity pricing, improves electricity consumption behavior of the facility and hence reduces its energy costs. An energy management system (EMS) model is proposed in this paper for minimizing electricity consumption costs of an oil refinery facility considering on-site cogeneration capability. The energy management is based on power demand modeling of the oil refinery process. A joint electrical-thermal model is used for the cogeneration units to account for the electricity and steam production. The developed EMS model is also used as part of a demand response strategy to illustrate the impact of EMS decisions on distribution system operations.