11. Seawater desalination

With water resources becoming increasingly scarce to meet all needs, seawater desalination is emerging as one of the future solutions to water stress. There are two processes for producing drinking water from seawater:

• Reverse osmosis (the most common);

• staged distillation.

By 2022, 21,000 seawater desalination plants were operational on every continent. The world's annual freshwater production capacity is estimated at 45 km ³ , representing around 10% of the water withdrawn for human consumption (table 7 ). The reverse osmosis desalination process consumes between 2.5 and 3.5 kWh per m ^...