Investment and production costs of desalination plants by semi-empirical method

Abstract Energy consumptions and costs of desalting systems are among the main parameters affecting the choice of certain desalting system and desalted water final cost. The paper describes a semi-empirical method for determining production and investment costs taking into account plant capacity, availability, energy price and consumption, plant capital cost, membrane service life and other process variables. This study concerns the different desalting processes of seawater, namely distillation multi-stage multi-flash, distillation multi-effect, vapour compression and the reverse osmosis. Results show that this method can give a good estimation of the investment and production costs for the concerned processes. Surely, this method can be useful especially in the maturation and the feasibility of any project in the field of desalination. So that most decisions of realization of any project can be taken in a relatively short time and therefore, costs of engineering can be reduced considerably.