According to the Ministry of Natural Resources, by the end of 2018 142 seawater desalination projects were completed, with a scale of 1,121,700 tons per day. The largest single unit of the seawater desalination project is 200,000 tons per day. Technology mainly adopts reverse osmosis and multi-stage flash seawater desalination. In the Northern Ocean Economic Zone around Tianjin, Shandong and Hebei, projects focus on large-scale industrial seawater desalination for the electricity and steel industry. In the eastern and southern marine economic zones, there are many private seawater desalination projects on remote islands, mainly distributed in Zhejiang and Guangdong, with 100-ton and 1,000-ton projects. In addition to seawater desalination, seawater used for cooling by the end of 2018 increased to 13,156 million tons.
Japan JST China news, February 10, 2020