The long story short is: gas plants usually use the gas turbine as prime driver of the electrical generator, because there is a lot of gas around. Unfortunately, the gas turbines don’t have remarkable efficiency, meaning, they waste/release a lot of heat into the atmosphere.
On the other hand, the gas plant process requires heat to “cook” the gas and take out from it water, CO2, etc, through evaporation and controlled condensation.
In order to utilise some of the heat generated by the gas turbine, it is used a heat exchanger installed on the exhaust “pipe” of the gas turbine.
The heat exchanger transfers the heat from the exhaust gases to a heat transfer medium, which could be oil or water. In many gas plants I’ve seen oil used as transfer medium. But when big gas turbines are involved, usually the transfer medium is water which expands, becomes steam and it is used to drive a steam turbine, then part of the steam released by the steam turbine is used to heat the gas process.
So, recuperating the heat from the gas turbine, it improves the overall efficiency of the gas turbine and saves some gas being burned separately to generate heat required in the gas process.
Regards,
Stefan