Development of natural gas in Lebanon : assessment of its impact on electric power generation.

Abstract

The increased reliance of modern societies on electricity urges the need for a reliable power system that provides uninterrupted power at a reasonable cost. Lebanon’s power sector has been suffering since the civil war from various financial and technical problems. One of the main problems of the sector is the failure of the present generation capacity to satisfy the total demand, leading to frequent load shedding. A strategic expansion plan is necessary to increase the generation capacity according to the anticipated load growth. The generation expansion plan has to take into consideration the need for a shift to cleaner generation sources and fuels. This can be done by first, increasing the share of renewable energy sources (RES) in the energy mix. Furthermore, developed countries are trying to shift to natural gas (NG) for being a cheaper and cleaner alternative to oil or coal. Lebanon, likewise has the opportunity to add NG to its energy mix, especially with the claims of its presence offshore. This thesis evaluates a proposed generation expansion plan and assesses several potential scenarios, in light of recent developments in renewable energy (RE) and explorations for NG. Reliability of the proposed system is assessed from energy and financial perspectives. Probabilistic production costing is used to calculate the Expected Energy Not Supplied (EENS), and evaluate the energy produced in addition to the costs of production and investments required. The assessment is done using a standard generation expansion planning (GEP) software available in the ECE department at AUB, which has been upgraded to incorporate RES using the residual load duration curve method (RLDC) and modified to serve the requirements of the study. The program is applied to four scenarios. The first scenario is the baseline case, where the thermal units keep using heavy fuel oil (HFO) and diesel oil (DO) throughout the whole study. The second scenario assumes that local natural gas will be available for thermal plants starting fro