Optimal crude blending in floating, storage and offloading platforms (FSOPs)

Abstract

Decisions based on crude transportation, crude handling, crude blending and crude delivery provide optimization opportunities to the FSOP to minimize huge expenses which could otherwise be worth millions of dollars per day. A discussion covers crude blending in FSOP as an important sub problem of the bigger crude oil scheduling problem using FSOP as an offshore technology; volume based crude properties that introduce bilinearity; reducing the problem into a Mixed Integer Trilinear Programming problem; solution strategy; countering trilinearity arising from crude blending in the larger crude scheduling problem; and characteristics of the algorithm. This is an abstract presented at the 2009 AIChE Annual Meeting (Nashville, TN 11/8-13/2009).