**6. Conclusions**

Seawater desalination is an emerging approach for producing freshwater in China, and the number of plants, as well as the installed capacity, are increasing. Simultaneously, the energy consumption, and environmental impacts are also increasing. This study initially investigated the energy consumption, GHG emission of the seawater desalination in China from 2006 to 2016, and the unit product cost in 2016. The key findings and conclusions are:


Limitation of this work, and also the potential for future works are, (1) Energy consumption should specify different energy forms, e.g. heat and power. In this study, due to the limit of data, the energy used in different processes are converted into electricity. But it is necessary to investigate different energy forms for a more detailed analysis, and the cost analysis would be more accurate. (2) When data is available, the capital cost of the plants should be calculated based on the type of process. (3) Alternatives for process integration should be investigated—e.g. efficiency of using the energy, heat integration, and renewables in water desalination, as well as the utilization of total site heat integration.

**Author Contributions:** All the authors contributed to publishing this paper and developed the research idea and provided the supervision. X.J. prepared the manuscript and was responsible for the data processing. J.J.K., P.S.V., and S.R.W.A. reviewed and edited the manuscript. X.J., J.J.K., P.S.V., and S.R.W.A. revised the paper.

**Funding:** The EU supported project Sustainable Process Integration Laboratory—SPIL funded as project No. CZ 02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15\_003/0000456, by Czech Republic Operational Programme Research and Development, Education, Priority 1: Strengthening capacity for quality research, in the collaboration agreemen<sup>t</sup> with the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) based on the SPIL project have been gratefully acknowledged.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
