In a country where water shortages have already crippled economic development, processing seawater for drinking and industrial use offers a future not only to the country but also to global investors. More than 300 specialists and businessmen from across the world flocked to Tianjin recently, looking for opportunities at the five-day congress of the International Desalination Association. Jeff Green, Founder and CEO of NanoH2O, announced at the congress that a desalination plant with a CNY45 million investment will be set up in Liyang, Jiangsu province, next year, the biggest investment that the company has made abroad. Green said the plant will supply high-quality reverse osmosis membranes to both domestic and overseas markets. The new products are expected to largely reduce desalination costs. The company believes the Chinese water desalination market will be worth CNY6 billion by 2020 and that at least 100 million people in the country will be drinking desalinated water by then. Reverse osmosis membranes are an essential material used during the desalination process. The water-processing costs are largely decided by the quality of the membranes. Those with higher permeability rates are able to effectively reduce energy consumption when seawater is pumped through the membranes to distill fresh water. Energy consumption accounts for about half of the total costs of desalination plants in China, said Wang Shichang, Desalination Expert at Tianjin University and a Co-chair of the International Desalination Association’s Congress. Tianjin has two desalination plants, supplying more than 6 million tons of water into the distribution network since 2010. China’s seawater processing capacity has reached about 760,000 tons per day, and the average cost has decreased from more than CNY20 per metric ton to about CNY7 a ton, a price similar to ordinary industrial water. As one of 13 countries across the world with a severe shortage of freshwater, China’s per capita freshwater reserves are only one-fourth of the global average. About 447 out of 600 cities in China suffer from water shortages, and 147 cities are seeing severe shortages, the China Daily reports.