Exploring energy-saving potentials in seawater desalination engineering from the energy-water nexus perspective

With the rapid population growth and economic development, the necessity to explore energy-saving potentials in typical seawater desalination project is increasingly essential. Taking the Reverse Osmosis (RO) seawater desalination project in Hebei Province, China as a case, this study performed systematic accounting framework combining the direct and indirect energy consumption from the energy-water nexus perspective, and carried out the energy-saving potential assessment and systematical optimization configuration. From the results, the total direct energy consumption of the project was 2.23 × 10⁶ kWh, and the total embodied energy consumption was 2.18 × 10⁷ kWh. Define the embodied energy consumption (ESE) as an evaluation index of energy saving potentials, the energy consumption degree before optimization is 79.54%, which could be reduced to 26.30% after optimization. The results showed that the systematic accounting framework in this study can greatly improve the accuracy of energy consumption measurement in the project, and the systematical optimization configuration can significantly reduce energy consumption and improve the energy-saving design under the minimum investment in the seawater desalination projects.