Fuel-cost apportionment and desalination technology selection based on exergy analysis

Water and power are two basic resources for the economic development, livelihood and well-being of a country’s population. Today’s power plant (PP) efficiency, although improved through decades of innovation, has peaked asymptotically in the last decade, ranging from 35% for thermal fuel-fired plants to more than 50% for the advanced, combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT). Similarly, the practical seawater desalination methods available today are either thermally driven, such as multi-stage flash (MSF) distillation, multi-effect distillation (MED) and adsorption desalination (AD), or pressure- or work-driven, such as reverse osmosis (RO). Today’s practical desalination processes’s are not only energy intensive but also environment unfriendly and they consume three times higher energy than minimum theoretical required energy limit of 0.85 kWh m^-3.