Abstract
Iran has faced with water scarcity problem for a long time. There is a strong tendency to desalinate seawater from Oman or the Caspian Sea as intake seawater and transfer it to central parts of the country. These projects face significant technical, economic, and environmental challenges. In this work, utilizing available economic theories about single-stage reverse osmosis (RO) desalination plants, the cost analysis of a conceptual plant with a production capacity of 200,000 m3/day, was accomplished assuming the use of Oman and Caspian seawater as feed. The effect of important parameters such as applied pressure, recovery ratio, total salt content of the feed, and produced water and the temperature has been studied theoretically. The results show that under the same working conditions, the final product price per cubic meter of freshwater from the Caspian Sea is $ 0.69 versus $ 1.24 for the Oman Sea, which is about 50% cheaper. The lower salinity of the Caspian Sea compared to the Oman Sea is the main reason, which lead to reduce in the capital cost of the RO membrane (62% difference), cost of the intake and pretreatment (20%), and cost of membrane elements replacement (13%) regardless of water transfer cost.
Highlights
Today, with an increasing population and more and more freshwater consumption, climate change, and uneven rainfall distribution, we face sharp increase in freshwater scarcity all of the world (Oki and Kanae 2006; Debele 2019; El-Emam and Dincer 2014)
Prices, it found that reverse osmosis (RO) water desalination with Caspian Sea intake water costs about 50% less than Oman Sea feed water
m3/day was accomplished assuming the use of the Oman and Caspian seawater as feed
Summary
With an increasing population and more and more freshwater consumption, climate change, and uneven rainfall distribution, we face sharp increase in freshwater scarcity all of the world (Oki and Kanae 2006; Debele 2019; El-Emam and Dincer 2014). In this study based on our last published article (Emamjome et al 2019) the theoretical modeling was modified for calculation of cost-effective part of two conceptual RO desalination plant with the capacity of 200,000 m3/day with different intake seawater of Oman Sea and Caspian Sea such as capital cost of the RO membrane, cost of the intake and pretreatment, and cost of membrane elements replacement. The SWRO concept unit proposed in this study produces 200,000 m3/day, while the salinity of the water produced is under 500 ppm In this working system, the seawater is pumped into the system by a low-pressure pump (Fig. 2). This parameter (rr) use for calculating the Qf and Qr as
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