Abstract
Over the past decade, the world refining industry has experienced a dramatic phase of restructuring. Yet the forthcoming mutations are no less crucial in economical and technological terms. Structural changes in market,environmental and product quality constraints, the raise of alternative energy sources, notably in transportation sector, will have big impact on this industry.
Consequently the efforts to be made to meet all these challenges are as great as diversified and not the least have to be achieved in a time when the refinery margins have been unfavourable to give earning returns on the investments and have an outlook quite uncertain.
Before coming on the technology issues, it is very important to try to draft a view of these long term refining uncertainties. They could be summarized as following:
Crude oil supply,
Product demand patterns,
Environmental regulations,
Volatile Refining margins,
Alternate energy sources.