Economic Evaluation of Water Desalination and Power Generation Using Flare Gases of Assaluyeh

‌ Water resource management in the areas close to oil platforms, refineries and petrochemical plants in the south of Iran has attracted more attention due to its enormous volume, high salinity as well as high costs. In many industries, a considerable amount of thermal energy is wasted which can be used for water desalination, as the most effective factor in the production cost of desalination plant is energy. Therefore, one of the challenges of the seawater desalination process by using thermal methods such as multi-stage flash (MSF), multi-effect distillation (MED) and etc., specifically in the countries which have very expensive energy resources, is the thermal energy supply. The purpose of this study is the simulation and economic evaluation of the combined power and water generation process by using flare gases. Due to the fact that flare gas contains acid gases, first, it is treated with a membrane process, and then it’s sent into a combined cycle power plant to generate power and thermal energy (vapor). The seawater desalination process is a multi-stage flash distillation type, and its thermal energy is supplied by a combined cycle power plant. The results show that if flare gas with a capacity of 13,000 m3/h is used, it can generate 57 MW of power and 150,000 L/h of water with a total capital cost of 98.40 million USD. With this amount of power and water generated by the process, it is easy to supply power of 45,000 households and water of 3,500 households