Northeast China eyes oceans as a new source of freshwater

China is looking seaward for more potable water under the central government’s Special Plan for Seawater Utilitzation, which calls for producing 3 million tons of purified water a day by 2020, Bloomberg reported. Construction has already begun on a desalinization plant on the shores of Bohai Bay west of Beijing that will pump 50,000 tons of freshwater to the capital. World Resources Institute warns that the high power demands of desalinization will encourage more coal-burning and urban smog in China’s already polluted, increasingly parched northern cities.