Development of a multi-criteria decision making approach for sustainable seawater desalination technologies of medium and large-scale plants: a case study for Saudi Arabia’s vision 2030

Abstract

The process of selecting sustainable desalination technique for a particular application is extremely challenging as the number of available desalination technologies is overwhelmingly high. Every technique stands suitable for many end-user applications such as industrial, community and household activities. However, specific methodologies for selecting the suitable sustainable desalination technology are limited particularly when assessing the requirements of a country composed of many regions with different requirements such as The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) which is planned to increase its production from 6.26 to 8.84 million m3 per day (m3/d) from 2017 to 2030. To overcome this issue, this work presents a development and implementation of modified TOPSIS approach, to account for the aggregation effect of the previous selected technology on the next selection of medium and large-scale desalination plants. Total of eighteen independent criteria have been evaluated; six main domains: environment, economy, technical, social, safety and policies and regulations, each has three sub-domain criteria. Parametric study based on actual and projected data of the case study is conducted for different scenarios in order to select the optimum desalination technologies as a function of several variables known to the decision makers such as, production, energy consumption and type of available fuel. The ultimate assessment criterion was the productivity of one barrel of oil equivalent (m3/boe). The study indicated that one barrel of oil equivalent which produces 29 m3 of desalinated water in 2015, shall be capable of producing 86.1 m3 by the end of 2030, through the process of implementation of more advanced desalination technologies.