Engineering topics
Publications and source records attributed to Tominac, Philip.
This presentation highlights developments in Project PARETO’s ongoing produced water exchange tools and makes audience members aware of planned pilot studies in the near future. It is geared towards requesting volunteers to partake in noncommittal pilots to test the software tools and provide feedback to aid in continued development.
The PARETO training workshop is a two-hour, interactive experience intended to teach participants how to: install PARETO software, input data into PARETO; run PARETO optimization; model a variety of complex network scenarios; and analyze, interpret, and compare optimization results.
The Texas Produced Water Consortium invited Project PARETO to contribute a write-up about the project to an update report they are preparing for the Texas legislature. The article we have prepared presents a high-level overview of the PARETO produced water management framework, and includes sections dedicated to going into more detail about PARETO’s strategic model and water sharing portals (AquaShare and AquaTrade).
Slide deck for presentation at the Produced Water Society Permian Basin Conference. Slides summarize ongoing development on Project PARETO’s Water Exchange Portal.
The poster presents updated PARETO capabilities. Focusing on demonstration example for PARETO capabilities handling water quality, produced water treatment, and optimal selection of technologies.
Managing oil and gas produced water, characterized by hypersalinity and large volumes, presents significant challenges. This paper introduces an advanced optimization framework, PARETO, which offers a novel approach to strategic water management, emphasizing produced water (PW) treatment, quality tracking, quantification of emissions, and environmental justice. This work pre-sents a case study showcasing different produced water management challenges. The PARETO framework demonstrated its effectiveness in optimizing water management strategies in line with environmental sustainability and regulatory compliance.
Modern mechanical recycling infrastructure for plastic is capable of processing only a small subset of waste plastics, reinforcing the need for parallel disposal methods such as landfilling and incineration. Emerging pyrolysis-based chemical technologies can "upcycle" plastic waste into high-value polymer and chemical products and process a broader range of waste plastics. In this work, we study the economic and environmental benefits of deploying an upcycling infrastructure in the continental United States for producing low-density polyethylene (LDPE) and polypropylene (PP) from post-consumer mixed plastic waste. Our analysis aims to determine the market size that the infrastructure can create, the degree of circularity that it can achieve, the prices for waste and derived products it can propagate, and the environmental benefits of diverting plastic waste from landfill and incineration facilities it can produce. We apply a computational framework that integrates techno-economic analysis, life cycle assessment, and value chain optimization. Our results demonstrate that the infrastructure generates an economy of nearly 20 billion USD and positive prices for plastic waste, opening opportunities for compensation to residents who provide plastic waste. Our analysis also indicates that the infrastructure can achieve a plastic-to-plastic degree of circularity of 34% and remains viable under various external factors (including technology efficiencies, capital investment budgets, and polymer market values). Finally, we present significant environmental benefits of upcycling over alternative landfill and incineration waste disposal methods, and comment on ongoing work expanding our modeling methodology to other chemical upcycling pathway case studies, including hydroformylation of specific plastics to chemicals.
The presentation at the NETL Resource Sustainability Project Review Meeting will provide an overview of Project PARETO tool capabilities, features, and extensions.
The presentation at the 34th Annual Conference of the Produced Water Society centers on the PARETO project, offering an overview tailored for new attendees. It emphasizes the latest advancements in the project's capabilities, particularly in the areas of treatment and beneficial reuse of produced water.
Conference slide deck for participation in the Produced Water Society 2024 Annual Meeting research round table with a demonstration of a produced water market clearing tool that is presently in development. Our demonstration illustrates how an alternative approach to produced water management can reduce costs for operators and increase produced water recycling rates.
This is a standalone release of PARETO UI using the previously released PARETO version 0.9.0 for the backend.. New features in this version of PARETO UI are: - Added functionality to upload GIS map network visualizations and auto generate input templates - Added map visualizations based on GIS data
The presentation contains research findings of the expansion planning subtask within the IDAES core activity. The presentation highlights the expansion planning capabilities applied to a case study in the San Diego County area. The research findings were presented at the AIChE Annual Meeting.
PARETO 0.9.0 Release. Highlights: New Features - Initial beneficial reuse implementation - Post-optimization timing for infrastructure buildout Bug Fixes - Address Pyomo solver bug for UI Gurobi solve - Update Toy Case Study to feasible data for hydraulics post_process - Update Jupyter notebook for fall release UI Updates - Added functionality to optimize with hydraulics options - Added new plots to KPI dashboard for water quality and hydraulics timelines