INGAR   05399
INSTITUTO DE DESARROLLO Y DISEÑO
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
An Integrated Strategy to Define the Optimal Energy Infrastructure Under Fossil Resources Availability Uncertainty
Autor/es:
JULIO FLORES; MARIA LAURA CUNICO; MARÍA ANALÍA RODRIGUEZ; ALDO VECCHIETTI
Lugar:
Atlanta
Reunión:
Conferencia; 2014 AIChE Annual Meeting; 2014
Institución organizadora:
AIChe
Resumen:
Fossil fuels have been the main source of energy to produce goods and services. Even today, most countries present an energy matrix based on this non-renewable and contaminant sources. However, energy demand is increasing, reserves will be not available at some point in the future and the extraction and exploration costs will increase substantially. In addition, there is an increasing interest for producing cleaner energy leading to developments in renewable energy supply and production. Nevertheless, substituting fossil source by other sources requires new and efficient technologies, well oriented politics and capital investments. Several forecasts can be found in the literature regarding non-renewable resources availability (Ediger et al., 2006; Shafiee and Topal, 2009 and 2010). However, the future of non-renewable sources is full of uncertainty. There are possible oil wells located in places very difficult to explore, in which the quantity or quality of the oil is completely unknown, but also, new findings and technologies such as shale gas (Wang and Rong, 2010), suggest a more optimistic future. In this work, this uncertainty is considered a key element in the definition of the optimal energy infrastructure plan. Therefore, we propose an optimization model to plan investments in the energy structure considering uncertainty in the fossil source availability. Given a set of potential sources, the main objective is to determine the capacities required in order to meet energy demand for the next twenty years assuming that the availability of oil and gas is subject to uncertainty. In order to take into account the environmental impact of energy decisions, the emission greenhouse gases (GHG) is penalized in the objective function. The mathematical model proposed considers renewable and non-renewable sources to supply energy to different type of customers and uses. The non-renewable sources are crude oil, and natural gas, while in the renewable side wind power, biomass, hydraulic power and solar energy are considered. Energy markets included are: heavy and light transportation, commercial and residential heating, industrial and residential electricity and industrial consumes of energy. The use of non-renewable resources cannot surpass the reserves during the project lifetime. Renewable sources have a limited capacity by geographical limitations, political rules, etc. An integrated strategy is developed in order to define an alternative energy infrastructure for the next years. In order to consider the uncertainty in the fossil source availability we first generate a set of scenarios applying fuzzy sets methodology (Zimmerman, 1976) and then a two-stage stochastic approach (Sahinidis, 2004) is applied. The same variation range has been considered for both models, the fuzzy model includes the lowest and greatest values of the uncertain parameters of the 2-stage model. The random behavior of resource availability in the fuzzy model causes that different investment and energy production decisions are made. The 2-stage stochastic model integrates the different decision levels involved in the problem. Only one investment solution is obtained that takes into account the set of scenarios generated assuming a normal distribution of the fossil reserves parameters. In the Argentinean case study, the results from the fuzzy model show that there are some sources less sensitive to the scenario fluctuation, such as solar, hydrokinetic turbines and wind power. But in general, strategic decisions are affected by the scenario considered. The 2-stage model is implemented generating a set of 1000 scenarios. The results from this strategy reveal the advantages of natural gas because of its versatility and low cost, and a low environmental impact in comparison to other fossil sources. As long as this resource grows, the need of oil diminishes. Given the scarcity of natural gas reserves, it would be convenient in the future to explore the technical and economic impacts of exploiting shale gas sources. Finally, these models can be used to plan incentives and subsidies for future energy investment. They give different perspectives of the same problem that can be used together in the definition of energy policies.