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Water is the most important resource of the Earth and is significantly utilized for agriculture, urbanization, industry, and population. This increases the demand for water; meanwhile, the climatic condition decreases the supply of it. A rise in temperature of 1 degree Celsius might dry up 20% of renewable water resources, and to circumvent the water scarcity, it is necessary to reuse, create, and consume less water without wasting it. Water desalination is the process used to reuse the used or saline water by promptly extracting the salt or unwanted minerals and producing fresh consumable water. Based on the International Desalination Association, around 300 million people rely on desalination and the people of the Middle East region rely the most upon it. Around 7% of desalination plants are located in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Reverse osmosis (RO) is the relevant desalination process in this type of area however, the conventional methods include more complexities, and hence to address this issue we proposed a novel approach known as Hybrid Capuchin and Rat swarm algorithm (HCRS) for effective water desalination technology using conventional sources and renewable energy in the middle east region. Moreover, a hybrid reverse osmosis plant model is developed for identifying renewable sources such as wind and solar energy. The proposed optimization can be used to mitigate the life cycle cost and enhances the reliability of the hybrid schemes. The experiment is conducted in a MATLAB simulator and compared the results with state-of-art works over the metrics such as relative error, system cost, and reliability. Our proposed method outperforms all the other approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In Kuwait, electricity is becoming an increasingly essential element of modern life. This flexible energy is used for heating, cooling, appliances, TVs, computers and transportation. The demand for electricity is growing at an average of 5.4% per year well above the world average of 2.7%. The growth of Kuwait energy demand is projected to rise sharply over coming years. The Ministry of Electricity and Water (MEW) expects that the peak demand will grow to 17.2 GW by the year 2013. The chilled water thermal storage (CWTS) system is one of the available techniques that can be utilized to reduce peak electricity demand of buildings when national electricity consumption is at its highest level. In this paper, Life Cycle Cost (LCC) was estimated to investigate impact of implementing CWTS for cooling of buildings for both the MEW and the consumer. Results show that CWTS operating with a load leveling strategy gives the lowest LCC compared to 50% demand limiting and full storage strategies, and is, therefore, considered as the most cost effective option for both MEW and consumer. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This study proposed two concepts for ammonia fuel storage for an ammonia-fueled ammonia carrier and evaluated these concepts in terms of economics. The first concept was to use ammonia in the cargo tank as fuel and the second concept was to install an additional independent fuel tank in the vessel. When more fuel tanks were installed, there was no cargo loss. However, there were extra costs for fuel tanks. The target ship was an 84,000 m3 ammonia carrier (very large gas carrier, VLGC). It traveled from Kuwait to South Korea. The capacity of fuel tanks was 4170 m3, which is the required amount for the round trip. This study conducted an economic evaluation to compare the two proposed concepts. Profits were estimated based on sales and life cycle cost (LCC). Results showed that sales were USD 1223 million for the first concept and USD 1287 million for the second concept. Profits for the first and second concepts were USD 684.3 million and USD 739.5 million, respectively. The second concept showed a USD 53.1 million higher profit than the first concept. This means that the second concept, which installed additional independent fuel tanks was better than the first concept in terms of economics. Sensitivity analysis was performed to investigate the influence of given parameters on the results. When the ammonia fuel price was changed by ±25%, there was a 15% change in the profits and if the ammonia (transport) fee was changed by ±25%, there was a 45% change in the profits. The ammonia fuel price and ammonia (cargo) transport fee had a substantial influence on the business of ammonia carriers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]