Exergical analysis of four reforming processes comprising two stand-alone autothermal reformers (ATR) and top fired reformers (TFR) plus their combination forms as a parallel and series arrangements have been investigated in the present article. The coupled mathematical code in the Visual Basic program and Aspen HYSYS process simulator linked together in order to calculate physical and chemical exergies of industrial plants streams. Four distinct key parameters including dry productivity, exergy loss to dry productivity ratio, fuel consumption, and CO2 emission have been considered to compare all the reformers arrangements together. The maximum and minimum dry productivity among all reformers belongs to TFR (86058 kg/hr) and parallel mode (73220 kg/hr), respectively. The exergy loss to dry productivity ratio for TFR, ATR, series and parallel modes is 1.88, 0.46, 0.73 and 0.57, respectively. It was shown that, although single ATR has minimum exergy loss to dry productivity ratio, no undesirable CO2 emission and does not consume fuel, but it utilizes high cost O2 as an oxidant agent which demand separate oxygen plant. Also, parallel reformer arrangement has consumed around 57% more fuel than series arrangement. Furthermore, it was concluded that high consumption of steam rate in processes would increase the possibility of exergy loss.

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