Abstract
Thermal desalination processes prevailed over other desalination processes. In the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, multistage flash (MSF) plants are the predominant method since 1960. MSF produces about 94% of the total water production of thermal desalination processes in the GCC countries. MSF desalination technology is the vast producer of desalinated water in Middle East and North Africa (MENA), representing 53% of total capacity. About 85% of water production by the Saline Water Conversion Corporation of Saudi Arabia is provided by large MSF plants. MSF is a well- established technology for seawater desalination. It has long plant working times of more than 30 years. MSF has experienced enormous technical improvements in various major desalination issues; scaling and fouling, high energy requirements, and severe corrosion especially on the vapor side. Successful developments were achieved in scale formation control, selection of appropriate materials, increase of evaporator production capacity, reduction in water production cost and decrease in environmental impacts for better operation, maintenance and maintain higher plant life time. In this work, the present trend and the future outlook of MSF plant will be discussed. The paper will focus on the main challenges that are faced by MSF desalination plants and analyse the competition promoted by other desalination processes, such as reverse osmosis (RO) and multi-effect distillation.