Environmentally conscious design of upstream crude oil supply chain

In the past few decades, very rapid growth in environmental legislation has resulted in an increasing will of companies to address environmental thinking through their supply chain. In this context, great strides have been made to incorporate the environmental concerns, such as “green” and “sustainable” supply chains, along with the traditional economic indicators. To assess the environmental impacts, there is no agreement on a universal environmental metric. Hence, a plethora of indicators has been developed to measure environmental impacts. The environmental indicators (e.g., Eco-indicator 99) that are founded on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) framework and nowadays are becoming among the popular environmental assessment methodologies. The crude oil tankers and utilities consumptions are the main origins of emissions through the crude oil supply chain. The energy required for operating upstream facilities in the crude oil supply chain represents enormous energy consumption. Whereas, ships and oil tankers are of the highest polluting combustion origins, per unit of fuel used. As a result, environmentally conscious design of upstream crude oil supply chain has created intriguing new challenges for practitioners and the managers. In this work, we introduce an environmentally conscious mathematical model to design the Upstream Oil Supply Chain (i.e., oil field development, and crude oil transportation). The model configure the supply network, select the technologies, establish the pipeline network, and plan the oil tankers with optimizing the economic objective value (i.e., the net present value) and the environmental metric value (i.e., the standard Eco-indicator 99 value).