Analyzing the effects of Gas-to-Liquid (GTL) diesel blending on the efficiency and emissions of petroleum refineries and transport fuels in the U.S. and Europe

The transport sector is fast changing with demand for distillates increasing amidst declining gasoline consumption in many markets especially in the developed world. Increasingly refineries are stretched to operate less efficiently and this is manifested through a drop in efficiency as a consequence of increasing diesel production via less efficient routes, particularly on the marginal barrel of diesel. It has been suggested that this decline in diesel production efficiency, as the ratio of gasoline to diesel (G/D) production drops, can partly be mitigated through the use of Gas-to-Liquid (GTL) diesel. In this paper we adopted refinery Linear-Programming models to represent the refining system in Europe as well as a district in the U.S. to investigate the effects of increased availability of GTL diesel to a refiner on the energy efficiency and GHG emissions of refineries. Here we showed that indeed there is an improvement in diesel production efficiency with increasing GTL concentrations, but this efficiency gain (<0.5%) is insufficient to counteract the higher energy consumption and emissions associated with the production of GTL, thus leading to an overall decline in life cycle efficiency (up to 5%), and an increase in life cycle GHG emissions (up to 2%).