Industrial network under water stress: exploring the use of industrial symbiosis and desalination alternatives

Details

Supervisors

Semal, Pierre ; Mota, Bruna

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur de gestion, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

Water scarcity is a pressing global issue, prompting industries to seek ways to reduce their reliance on freshwater. To tackle this challenge, this study introduces a MILP model that integrates three different water supply sources: public network (ground or surface water), industrial symbiosis (IS), and seawater desalination. The main goal is to design the optimal network connecting the potential sources to the recipient industries, by minimizing freshwater consumption, overall cost structure, and environmental impacts. The model is applied to a case study involving five Portuguese industries, analysing three scenarios: (1) current situation, where industries resort mostly to public network and self-reuse, (2) addition of IS and desalination as alternatives, (3) includes the three possible sources, but factors in the future freshwater availability limitation. Firstly, considering a single-objective optimization, the inclusion of IS and desalination as alternatives to the public water network leads to a considerable 33% reduction in freshwater consumption compared to the present situation. When factoring in limited freshwater availability, this reduction deepens to 64%, although counterbalanced by extremely elevated costs and environmental impacts. However, when the optimization is done simultaneously for the three objectives, the solution is much more well-balanced. Indeed, it achieves a 38% reduction in freshwater consumption, this time associated with a much more reasonable increase in costs and environmental impacts of 26% and 120%, respectively. To enhance its robustness, this study includes stochastic programming to handle uncertainties in water demand for each business.