A Novel Method in Designing Process Water Consumption Network in Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Industries

Integrated management of water supply and wastewater treatment has an essential role for reduction of cost of supplying water and treating water effluents of industrial process plants. Several approaches have been proposed for optimal design of water networks in oil, gas and petrochemical industries. Each of these methods have their advantages and drawbacks. In the present study, a general and simple method is proposed for integrated design of non-isothermal water networks that consists of two stages: (1) designing of integrated water networks by using the concentration potential method, and (2) applying pinch algorithm to develop the energy network related to the designed water network at the first stage . Also, for verification of the suggested method an industrial case study has been investigated. The results of applying the proposed method on the industrial case study have been compared to those of obtained by heuristic based techniques at 2014. This comparison shows that the non-isothermal water network designed by our method has lower total annual cost with respect to water and energy consumption. The essential merit of the method presented in this study is the development of a general and new algorithm for conceptual design of non-isothermal water networks in petrochemical, oil and gas process industries. The amount of consumed water and the total annual cost in the designed network, based on the proposed method, are 77.28 (Kg/s) and 7942 ($/y) respectively, and in the network presented based on the previous method are 88.28 (Kg/s) and 8427 ($/y) respectively.