High-Octane Gasoline Production from Catalytic Naphtha Reforming

The global drive for environmental sustainability necessitates continuous adjustment, optimization, and improvement in petroleum refining processes to generate energy and products including automotive fuels such as gasoline. At the same time, refiners need to maximize their asset utilization to maintain competitiveness in the business setting. This chapter presents a process advisory and monitoring application to optimize a catalytic naphtha reforming operation to produce high octane gasoline feedstock. A mathematical model is developed for the process to produce hydrocarbons with high anti-knock ratings. The proposed methodology involves formulating a nonlinear programming optimization model to perform data reconciliation. The model objective minimizes the deviations (or errors) between the measured values and the model-reconciled values to reflect the accuracy and reliability of the measurements. The overall procedure is carried out subject to various real-world operation constraints to ensure sustainable processing of the required products, which include hydrogen gas and aromatics. We present a case study to illustrate an implementation of the resulting model in an online environment to improve process operation at an actual refinery in Canada. The computational results show enhanced product quality of a reformate stream with high octane number and increased yields