ABSTRACT Effective energy management and environmental protection have become critical priorities for the industrial sector, particularly in energy‐intensive processes such as crude oil refining. One such process involves maintaining the temperature of heavy oil products before dispatch from storage tanks, which requires substantial thermal energy. This study investigates the thermo‐economic performance of a hybrid solar heating system utilizing parabolic trough collectors (PTCs) integrated with and without thermal energy storage (TES) across diverse climatic regions in Pakistan. The refinery process was modeled using ASPEN HYSYS, while the hybrid solar system was simulated in TRNSYS. Results indicate that the PTC area of 325 m 2 without TES delivers 269.3 GJ of energy to the steam, whereas incorporating a 1500 L TES tank requires a PTC area of 463 m 2 , delivering 421.5 GJ to the steam. The annual solar fraction increases from 17.25% (without TES) to 27%, reducing the boiler's annual energy demand and yielding a payback period of 7.51 years. Furthermore, the proposed system can mitigate approximately 34.95 t of CO 2 emissions annually. The study reveals that local climatic conditions, such as ambient temperature and wind speed, significantly influence PTC performance. Among the five analyzed cities, Islamabad emerged as the most favorable location for system deployment, while Karachi's tropical desert climate was the least suitable. The proposed solar‐driven hybrid configuration analysis presented in this study provides a possible solution for preserving the crude oil products' temperature before it is dispatched from the tank of storage in a refinery.
Khan et al. (Sun,) studied this question.