Salinity gradient energy recovery with Batch Reverse Osmosis

Sultan Alnajdi, Ali Naderi Beni, Mateo Roldan-Carvajal, Joel Aboderin, Akshay K. Rao and David M. Warsinger

Renewable Energy, 2025, vol. 246, issue C

Abstract: Integrating desalination with energy requires dispatchable mechanisms to modulate power consumption. Blue Energy technologies like pressure retarded osmosis (PRO) have struggled for viability but may find a niche where regulations require brine dilution. This paper studies the technological and economic feasibility of coupling double-acting piston Batch Reverse Osmosis (BRO) with PRO through modeling. Two hybrid configurations were developed as demand-response methods to provide electricity to the grid and compared to stand-alone RO and BRO. We considered desalinating seawater with a 50% recovery ratio and PRO operating by mixing BRO brine with wastewater effluent. The hybrid configurations lowered desalination energy consumption by up to 26.6% compared to stand-alone RO and 10.2% compared to BRO. Sensitivity analysis reveals that high water permeability, low salt permeability, and high collapse pressure membranes favor energy recovery. While economics are location-dependent, the levelized cost of water in hybrid systems is higher than in stand-alone systems due to extra membrane modules. For hybrid systems to be cost-effective, electricity prices must exceed 0.4 USD/kWh. Nonetheless, hybrid configurations offer flexibility, either delivering electricity to the grid or reducing desalination energy consumption.

Keywords: Specific energy consumption; Reverse osmosis; Batch reverse osmosis; Pressure retarded osmosis; Demand response (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014812500463X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:246:y:2025:i:c:s096014812500463x

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2025.122801

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().