e. fatehifar

Due to the environmental issues and problems caused by excessive waste production in the oil industry, environmental protection agencies impose some rules and restrictions on various industrial activities that require accounting, environmental assessment, and problem detecting and solving. In the present article old gasoline production unit of Tabriz Oil Refining Company has been investigated using the Material Flow Cost Accounting (MFCA). The results showed that only 73% of the unit output is positive products which comprises gasoline and hydrogen, and the rest, which equals to 27% of outputs, is negative products, which costs 1350 billion Rials per year. In order to reduce costs in this unit, the heat stored in exhaust gases in furnace chimneys was reused and it was found that this would prevent the loss of 562 million Kilojoules of energy and heat to the atmosphere per minute. Other suggested methods include the use of variable speed electric drives in unit’s electromotors, which showed that by using variable speed drives, the cost of energy consumption would decrease by 30%, which is equivalent to 763 million Rials per year.

Oil and gas processing plants are one of the most air pollutant industries. In this paper, gaseous air pollutants emission factors were estimated for pollutant sources in an Iranian Natural Gas Liquids (NGL) plant using fuel analysis method and published emission factors. The results showed that the main pollutant sources in this unit are gas flare, gas turbines, pit and boiler. Total Hydro Carbons (THC) and CH4 emissions from gas flares and NO2 emission from gas turbine are higher than any other pollutant sources. Activity based emission factors were determined as 513.3, 2731.0, 0, 1805.3 and 225.6 g/1000kg LPG for NO2, CO, SO2, THC and CH4 respectively on the basis of LPG production in the unit. Because of possible gas leakages from the units, CH4 emission factor have larger margin of error. Calculated emission factors can be used for emission estimation of air pollutant in other similar NGL processing units.

Volatile organic compounds are among the most common air pollutants emitted from chemical and petrochemical industries. For the reason that these compounds can cause various hazards for the environment, removal of these pollutants seems to be very necessary; on the other hand, these VOCs have good commercial value and can be recovered. In this research, various available VOCs removal and recovery techniques as well as their advantages and disadvantages were investigated and optional methods for different conditions have been suggested. Among these methods adsorption, condensation and absorption have been considered as useful methods for recovery of VOCs.