Desalination 488 (2020) 114523

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Desalination
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/desal

A top-down approach to estimate global RO desalination water production T

considering uncertainty
⁎ ⁎
Xiang Zhenga, Junying Wena, Lei Shia, Rong Chenga, , Zhenxing Zhangb,
a
School of Environment & Natural Resources, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China
b
Illinois State Water Survey, Prairie Research Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820, USA

A R T I C LE I N FO A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Desalination is one of the promising methods to address the water shortage, especially for the coastal areas. To
Water supply understand the present status of the desalination industry, it is of importance to accurately estimate the mag-
Alternative water resources nitude of water production of the desalination industry. However, traditional bottom-up approaches to estimate
Desalination water production desalination water production magnitude are often relying on data of individual water treatment plants and may
RO
lead to contradictory results since it is extremely difficult to obtain accurate desalination water production data
of most water treatment plants. Considering RO modules are manufactured by limited major suppliers globally,
we propose a top-down approach to estimate global RO desalination water production. The approach is to
estimate RO desalination water production based on the quantity of RO modules sold globally by the RO module
manufacturers. This provides an obvious advantage as there are much less RO module manufacturers than the
RO module users (water treatment plants). Using this approach and the most recently available RO module sales
data, the global water production of RO desalination in 2017 is 122.0 ± 31.5 million m3/d (mean ± SD, at the
95% confidence interval), which is 53.2 million m3/d higher than that of the International Desalination
Association estimate (compared by the mean).

1. Introduction makers for informed decision-making on the policies of the desalination

The rapid growth of the global population [1] and the development
of industry has intensified the water shortage [2]. Desalination, which
produces freshwater from brine water, seawater and other unfavorable
water, is considered as a promising technology to address water
shortage in the future. Desalination has been increasingly employed
worldwide to produce water aiming to address the water shortage issue
in the last two decades [3]. About 136 countries or regions around the
world applied desalination technology to produce water by 2000 when
desalination plants were mainly located in the Middle East, followed by
Europe and the United States. By 2017, desalination technology was
applied in about 231 countries or regions due to the rapid increase in
water demand and the significant reduction in the desalination cost. In
less than 20 years, the number of countries using desalination tech-
nology to produce water has been almost doubled.
The magnitude of global desalination water production which is the
total water produced by desalination technology globally, provides
critical information on the researches and applications of global desa-
lination technology and the contribution of the technology to mitigate
the water shortage issue. It also provides scientific information to policy
technology researches and applications. Thus, it is of importance to
accurately estimate global desalination water production.
Historically, many researchers, government agencies, and non-
government organizations, such as International Desalination
Association (IDA), have conducted extensive data collection and re-
searches on how to estimate desalination water production. To our
knowledge, most approaches to estimate global desalination water
production is the type of bottom-up approach, that is to estimate de-
salination water production by summing up desalination water pro-
duction by individual water treatment plants, i.e. desalination users and
water producers. This bottom-up approach has several major dis-
advantages which include (1) it is very time-consuming as there are
thousands of water treatment plants worldwide; (2) it is inconsistent as
each country has varying criteria to monitor and report water pro-
duction; and (3) it is prone to underestimate or overestimate desali-
nation water production. It is extremely difficult, if possible at all, to
count all water treatment plants worldwide and not every water
treatment plant would reply or report their water production. For ex-
ample, China desalination water production estimated by the IDA [4]
was remarkably less than that estimated by Chen et al. Chen et al. [5]

⁎
Corresponding authors.
E-mail address: zhang538@illinois.edu (Z. Zhang).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.desal.2020.114523
Received 15 February 2020; Received in revised form 5 May 2020; Accepted 7 May 2020
0011-9164/ © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
X. Zheng, et al. Desalination 488 (2020) 114523

estimated China desalination water production of about 27 million m3/

d in 2014, more than 5 times of that of IDA's estimate. On the other
hand, China seawater desalination production estimated by China Na-
tional Oceanic Administration [6] is 1.2 million m3/d in 2016, which is
only 50% of that estimated by IDA [7]. For Saudi Arabia, the Ministry of
Water and Electricity of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia estimated desalina-
tion water production of 2.9 million m3/d in 2010 [8], but IDA's studies
estimated it as 0.88 million m3/d [9]. Both China and Saudi Arabia
played important roles of using a wide range of desalination technol-
ogies for water production. Therefore, it is critical to comprehensively
examine the accuracy of global desalination water production con-
sidering uncertainty.
Chen et al. [5] tried to estimate China's desalination water pro-
duction with a top-down approach. In the top-down approach, they
used sales of 8-inch reverse osmosis (RO) membrane and unit capacity
of 8-inch RO membrane module to calculate the desalination water
production in China. The newly estimated China's desalination water
production was remarkably greater than those estimated by traditional
bottom-up methods and has been gaining attention from academia,
industry, and government agencies [10]. The major advantage of the
approach is that it relies on data from a small number of membrane
manufacturers which makes it less time-consuming, more reliable, and Fig. 1. The framework of the new statistical method.
more consistent than bottom-up approach. Chen et al.'s study showed
that the bottom-up approaches potentially underestimate China's de- membrane module is estimated based on a survey of representative RO
salination water production. membrane applications worldwide. The water production is then cal-
In this study, we expand and refine the top-down approach to es- culated as
timate global RO desalination water production. The top-down ap-
proach relying on the data of the upper end of the supply chain (whole Wn = Un × Pm (1)
sale data) is often used for consumer goods such as air conditioners [11] where Wn is the RO membrane water production in year n, Un re-
or refrigerators [12] because the data of the lower end of the supply presents the usage of RO membrane modules in year n, and Pm is the
chain (usage data) is difficult to obtain. On the other hand, in en- unit water production per RO membrane module (m3/d per module).
gineering and technology applications, the bottom-up approaches are
commonly used to estimate the magnitude or applications. Therefore,
2.2. Estimation of annual usage of RO membranes
desalination water production has been traditionally estimated using
usage data of membrane modules from individual users (water treat-
The annual RO membrane usage is calculated as
ment facilities and plants). However, the RO membrane industry is
dominated by limited manufacturers and is diversified by thousands of Un = Sn + Sn − 1 + Sn − 2 + ⋯+Sn − j (2)
varying users. This makes it difficult to estimate RO desalination water
production using the bottom-up approaches. Instead, the top-down where j = k − 1; k is the average lifespan of RO membrane module;
approaches may be better for estimating RO desalination water pro- and Sn is the RO membrane module sales in year n.
duction. RO membrane market is dominated by seven membrane manu-
The top-down approach uses three major types of data (1) annual facturers, including Dow, Nitto Denko, Toray, Koch, GE, Toyobo and
sales of 8-inch RO membrane modules by major RO membrane manu- VONTRON [5,13]. As of 2017, these seven membrane manufacturers
facturers, (2) the average lifetime of RO membrane modules, and (3) accounted for more than 80% of RO membrane market share [10]. The
the unit water production per RO membrane module. Uncertainties RO membrane modules used in desalination have been mainly 8-inch
associated with all three types of data are unavoidable. Due to limited membranes [5]. Since 2003, the 8-inch membrane modules accounted
data availability on data of membrane module sales and lifetime, we for about 90% of all RO membrane modules. Thus, the usage of RO
focus on the uncertainty associated with the unit module water pro- membrane modules is calculated from annual sales of 8-inch RO
duction. This study contributes to quantify the uncertainty in global RO membrane modules by the seven major manufacturers. Therefore,
desalination water production by analyzing uncertainty associated with global membrane module sales could be accurately counted based on
the unit module water production. the limited number of membrane manufacturers, comparing with the
membrane usage by thousands of membrane users. It is noteworthy that
2. Methodology we only report aggregated data as the sales by individual manufacturers
are proprietary by nature.
2.1. Estimation of desalination water production Based on available engineering data, the mean lifespan of an 8-inch
RO membrane is about 5 years though many factors would impact the
The top-down approach consists of four steps: (1) Estimate annual real lifespan of a RO membrane module. To calculate the annual usage
RO membrane sales based on data directly obtained from the major of RO membrane modules, the lifespan (k) is set as 5 in this study.
membrane manufacturers; (2) Estimate annual RO membrane usage;
(3) Calculate the average unit water production per RO membrane 2.3. Estimation of unit water production per RO membrane module
module and its standard error; and (4) Compute mean global RO
membrane water production and the 95% confidence interval. The The unit water production per RO membrane module are impacted
flowchart of the approach is shown graphically in Fig. 1. by a range of factors including the brand, age, raw water, setups,
The annual RO membrane sales are obtained from the major conducted pressure, etc. To characterize the unit water production, we
membrane manufacturers. The annual membrane usage is then calcu- collected RO modules usage and water production data from a trove of
lated based on the annual sales. The unit water production per RO representative RO membrane applications worldwide. With the data,

2
X. Zheng, et al.
Fig. 2. The annual sales of 8-inch RO membrane modules worldwide from year
2013 to 2019.
we characterize the mean and standard deviation of unit water pro-
duction. It is noteworthy that the mean estimate with the available will
contain a substantial uncertainty and a single estimate value may not be
representative and thus uncertainty has to be considered.
3. Data
3.1. RO membrane sales
Fig. 2 shows the sales of 8-inch RO membrane modules worldwide
for the period 2013–2019. The annual sales of 8-inch RO membranes
was 2.1, 2.3 and 2.4 million in 2017, 2018 and 2019, respectively. The
sales of 8-inch increased with an annual rate of approximate 8% for the
period.
3.2. Unit water production per RO membrane module
With a thorough literature review from a wide range of resources
including technique reports and books [14], engineering documents
[15], and technical manuals, as well as reports from International De-
salination Association [7], State Oceanic Administration People's Re-
public of China [6] and China Desalination Association, 31 re-
presentative RO applications were selected to characterize the unit
water production as shown in Table 1. These applications cover a wide
range of desalination magnitude, geographic regions, RO membrane
manufacturers, raw waters, and application industries.
4. Results and discussion
Fig. 3 shows the annual global membrane usage for 2017–2019. The
global usage for 2017 to 2019 were 8.3, 9.3, and 10.0 million modules.
The unit water production per RO membrane module data were
analyzed and calculated with the SPSS 19.0. Fig. 4 shows the histogram
and the normal distribution fitting. From the figure, the unit water
production conforms to a normal distribution. Furthermore, a Kolmo-
gorov-Smirnov test showed that the hypothesis of normality cannot be
rejected at the significance level of 5%. The R-square is 0.925 (corre-
lation coefficient). The mean unit water production is 14.7 m3 per
module and the standard deviation is 1.9 m3. Based on the surveyed
data, it is reasonable to assume that unit water production follows a
normal distribution with mean of 14.7 m3 and standard deviation of
0.2 m3. Thus the 95% confidence interval of unit water production is
14.7 ± 3.8 m3.
Fig. 5 illustrates the global RO desalination water production and
associated uncertainty for 2017 to 2019. In 2017, 2018, and 2019, the
3
Desalination 488 (2020) 114523
global RO desalination water production is 122.0, 136.2, and
150.9 million m3/d, respectively. The 95% confidence interval esti-
mates for these years are 122.0 ± 31.5, 136.2 ± 35.2,
150.9 ± 39.0 million m3/d.
The RO desalination water production in 2017 estimated by the
bottom-up approach used by IDA was 68.8 million m3/d. It is
53.2 million m3/d less than the estimated mean RO desalination water
production (122.0 million m3/d) with the top-down method. This in-
dicates that the bottom-up approach used by IDA may potentially un-
derestimate the RO desalination water production.
5. Limitations
There are many factors impacting the estimate of average unit water
production of 8-inch RO module, which include the membrane setups
and raw water types. Different desalination plants employ various
setups, such as single or two-pass setups. Raw water types, such as
brackish water, seawater or surface water have remarkable impact on
the unit water production as well.
The average unit water production of a single module measures the
average water production but does not represent individual module
water production. The more RO applications used for estimating the
average, the more information it may provide. However, it is hard to
obtain accurate setup details of every single case, including the input
and output amount from every step. This limits the qualified practical
RO applications that can be used in this study.
The overall uncertainty is analyzed by using a representative data
set including 31 empirical cases selected by the following 3 rules: (1)
The plants with a water production of 5000 m3/d or more are included
so the data is not skewed by many small plants. (2) The membrane
manufacturer information should be available to reliably estimate the
unit water production. (3) We confirm the authenticity of all the plants
used in the study. In addition, the data set includes other aspects in the
consideration such as the industries, the geographical distribution, and
the raw water types. The plants in main industries using RO, such as
textile printing, petroleum, paper industry, municipal, irrigation, iron
and steel industry, electricity, cooling water and coal chemical in-
dustry, are included to avoid the dominance of a single industry ap-
plication. The plants are from many countries with lots RO applications.
Data set includes India, China, USA, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Japan,
Turkey, Kuwait, South Africa, and Israel. The data set includes different
raw water types, including surface water, biochemical wastewater,
seawater, ultrafiltration membrane effluent, brackish water, MBR pre-
treatment effluent, reuse metallurgical wastewater, sewage treatment
plants discharge water, industrial wastewater, tap water and secondary
drainage.
Nevertheless, to obtain high quality and detailed data of water
production of RO applications is still a major obstacle to improve the
estimation of global RO water production. Increasing quality and
quantity of the data will allow better characterization of uncertainty in
the future.
6. Conclusion
This study proposes a top-down approach that uses annual sales of
RO membrane modules and unit water production per RO membrane
module to estimate global RO desalination water production. The study
also considers uncertainty associated with estimating unit water pro-
duction and thus could provide interval estimates based on selected
confidence intervals. The newly estimated global RO desalination water
production for 2017 is 122.0 ± 31.5 million m3/d (mean ± SD, at the
95% confidence interval) which is much higher than that estimated by
IDA.
The top-down approach has several advantages that may lead to a
better estimate of the global RO desalination water production. The
approach relies on sales data from a limited number of membrane
X. Zheng, et al. Desalination 488 (2020) 114523

Table 1
Unit water production by representative RO applications.
No. Total capacity (m3/d) Raw water Location Applications Unit capacity (m3/d) Reference

1 5000 Textile printing wastewater Tamil Nadu, India Textile printing 16.7 [15]
2 12,480 Surface water Shan Dong, China Textile printing 21.7 [15]
3 30,000 Biochemical wastewater Singapore Petroleum industry 13.7 [16]
4 38,000 Surface water Ningbo, China Petroleum industry 20.7 [17]
5 50,000 Seawater Guangdong, China Paper industry 23.1 [15]
6 160,000 Seawater Perth, Australia Municipal 11.8 [18]
7 136,000 Seawater Trinidad Tobago Island Municipal 11.5 [19]
8 51,000 Surface water Alrass, Saudi Arabia Municipal 19.7 [20]
9 40,000 Seawater Japan Municipal 13.2 [15]
10 31,200 Ultrafiltration membrane effluent Karabuk, Turkey Municipal 18.1 [18]
11 50,000 Seawater Tangshan, China Municipal 10.8 [18]
12 50,000 Ultrafiltration membrane effluent Haimen, China Municipal 14.9 [18]
13 50,000 Surface water Zhejiang, China Municipal 17.5 [18]
14 16,320 Brackish water Qingyang, Gansu, China Municipal 14.6 [18]
15 10,000 Seawater Shandong, China Municipal 11.9 [15]
16 10,000 MBR pretreatment effluent Beijing, China Municipal 15.2 [18]
17 5087 Reuse of metallurgical wastewater Jiuquan, China Metallurgy 14.1 [18]
18 320,000 Sewage treatment plants discharge water Kuwait Irrigation 15.2 [15]
19 33,552 Industrial wastewater Shanxi, China Iron and steel industry 18.9 [21]
20 17,280 Industrial wastewater Shandong, China Iron and steel industry 16.0 [18]
21 12,000 Industrial wastewater Henan, China Iron and steel industry 13.8 [15]
22 5760 Reuse water Beijing, China Iron and steel industry 14.5 [15]
23 18,933 Secondary effluent USA Groundwater recharge 12.5 [22]
24 12,000 Industrial wastewater South Africa Electricity 16.3 [22]
25 34,560 Seawater Zhejiang, China Electricity 14.2 [15]
26 10,000 Seawater Hebei, China Electricity 14.3 [15]
27 7680 Tap water Shandong, China Electricity 22.9 [15]
28 100,000 Secondary effluent India Cooling Water 16.0 [23]
29 19,200 Industrial wastewater Henan, China Coal Chemical Industry 15.2 [18]
30 15,000 Seawater Middle-East SHUAIBAH III – 12.7 [24]
31 14,000 Seawater Israel – 12.2 [25]

Fig. 3. The 8-inch membrane module usage worldwide from 2017 to 2019. Fig. 4. The histogram of unit water production by the representative RO ap-
plications.

manufacturers instead of thousands of membrane users. Thus, it is less

time-consuming as one does not need to collect data from thousands of
membrane users from about 200 countries and regions. It may be more
accurate as missing reports or duplicate reports are less possible.
When finer sales data is available for specific countries or regions, it
is warranted to use the top-down approach to estimate regional RO
desalination water production. It is noteworthy that engineering ana-
lysis of RO membrane modules may shed more lights on the distribution
of the lifespan of the modules which in the future could be used to
improve the top-down approach.
Credit authorship contribution statement
Xiang Zheng: Conceptualization, Data curation, Writing - ori-
ginal draft. Junying Wen: Data curation, Writing - original draft. Lei
Shi: Data curation. Rong Cheng: Visualization, Supervision.
Zhenxing Zhang: Methodology, Writing - review & editing.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influ-
ence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgement
This project is supported by the special fund from the State Key
Joint Laboratory of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control
(Research Center for Eco-environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of

4
X. Zheng, et al.
Fig. 5. The estimated 8-inch RO membrane water output worldwide.
Sciences) (Project No. 18K02KLDWST). This work was partially sup-
ported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities,
and the Research Funds of Renmin University of China (18XNLG29,
19XNLG21).
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