Regional management of flare gas recovery based on water-energy-environment nexus considering the reliability of the downstream installations

Abstract

Water-energy-environment nexus was employed in a sample city for flare gas recovery while the reliability of downstream installation is taken into account. First, considering the average characteristics of a house, water and energy demands were estimated. The residential section's water and energy demands were then supplied using flare gas recovery from an oil field near the city. The study was conducted in two scenarios based on meeting the total annual electricity demand and the residential sector's total annual natural gas demand. A hybrid system including a natural-gas liquid refinery, a gas turbine power plant, a heat recovery steam generator, and multi-effect desalination was proposed as downstream installations. By system reliability's consideration using the Markov technique, a novel integrated model was developed to assess different proposed scenarios. In both scenarios, the water and energy shortages could be provided by the network, and the surplus can be sold to the network. It was shown that considering the reliability of technology significantly affects the final configuration of flare gas recovery technology. It was shown that consideration of employed installations' reliability affects the proposed flare gas recovery technologies' features. Accordingly, the first scenario with a capital cost of 236.94 M$ and a product sales income of 93.31 M$, with 1.3 years of return payback period, was selected as the best solution.