Future scenario of China's downstream oil supply chain: An energy, economy and environment analysis for impacts of pipeline network reform.

In China, state-owned monopoly on multiproduct pipeline network leads to low energy efficiency, expensive logistics costs and high greenhouse gas emissions in the downstream oil supply chain. In response to increasing pressures applied by the conflict between supply and demand and the need for emission mitigation, the government has promoted pipeline network reform for years. However, the selection of an appropriate reform scheme is controversial, and no researcher has conducted quantitative analysis on this issue. This paper quantifies the impacts of pipeline network reform on the downstream oil supply chain of China so as to provide policy implications. An integrated evaluation framework is established by coupling a mathematical programming technique with the energy-economy-environment (3E) assessment method. Five future scenarios are designed including the baseline (BAU) and four types of reform policies: third-party access (TPA), pipeline network integration (PNI), business cooperation (BC) and third-party access combined with business cooperation (TPA-BC). The results indicate that (i) all reform schemes have significant benefits for aspects of 3E; (ii) the scenarios can be ranked by 3E performance as follows: TPA-BC > BC > PNI > TPA > BAU; and (iii) only when the pipeline networks need to reserve a high capacity margin can the advantages of PNI compared to TPA be revealed; otherwise, the gap between them is small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]