Design of a Biomass Power Plant for Burning Date Palm

AbstractDate palm trees (Phoenix dactylifera L.) produce approximately 40 kg ofburnable waste including dried leaves, spathes, sheaths, and petioles annu-ally. In this paper, the potential of date palm waste as a bioenergy source hasbeen investigated. As a sample project, a power plant has been preliminarydesigned to simultaneously generate electrical power using a steam Rankinecycle and distilled water by the thermal desalination of seawater using a mul-tiple e ect evaporator. The results indicated that a small plant in BushehrProvince in southern Iran which burns 140,000 tons of waste annually canproduce approximately 62 GWh of electricity in conjunction with 2.27 mil-lion tons of distilled water. This production is equivalent to 75 GWhe/year.Environmental assessments revealed that the use of this amount of biomassleads to a net green-house gas (GHG) reduction of 40,500 tCO 2 /year. 9 Key words: Biomass energy, Date palm, Cogeneration, Thermal 10 desalination, Rankine cycle Corresponding author Tel.: +987714222170, Fax: +987714540376, email:fatehi@pgu.ac.ir