Air Liquide operates several industrial gas pipeline networks around the world, connecting air separation plants to customers of industrial gases. The operation of such a network of plants, pipelines, and customers is complicated due to fluctuating electricity prices and customer demands. We describe a complex industrial problem for real-time optimization of network operations in the presence of these challenges. We then summarize a concerted modeling and algorithmic effort toward global optimization of this model. The resulting advances include development of a regression-based fully-deterministic nonconvex optimization model, a tool for diagnosing infeasibilities during model development, reformulations and scaling to make the model more amenable for optimization, and development of strengthened relaxations for its efficient solution. We provide details on the development of these tools and techniques that facilitated the solution of this model in a reasonable computational time with the global solver BARON. (C) 2016 American Institute of Chemical Engineers