GRID · DESALINATION
Where Seawater Becomes Fresh Water
When a place runs out of fresh water, it can make more — by pushing seawater through membranes, or boiling it and catching the steam. This layer maps the world’s major desalination plants as 100 water-droplet marks, and where they sit tells the story: they cluster almost exactly where water is scarcest — the Gulf states, Australia, Spain’s Mediterranean coast, Israel, California, and the mining coast of Chile’s Atacama, the driest desert on Earth. Lay this over the water-stress map and it reads almost as a negative. The colour carries the layer’s real subject — the energy cost: desalination is hugely power-hungry, so the gas-rich Gulf builds cogeneration megaprojects that make electricity and fresh water together off the same burning gas, while most of the rest run standalonereverse-osmosis plants on grid power. Wikidata carries no capacity figure, so the drops aren’t sized — type is the colour. Tap a drop for its name, type, country and year.
Two ways to unsalt the sea
The split is really about energy. A cogenerationplant — an “integrated water and power plant” — burns gas to spin turbines for electricity and uses the leftover heat to distil seawater, making power and water from one fuel; these are the giants of the Gulf, where gas is cheap and the sea is the only water. A standaloneplant is usually reverse osmosis: it draws electricity from the grid to force seawater through membranes that hold back the salt — the model in Spain, Israel, Australia, California and Chile. Same goal, very different energy footprint.
Where the thirst is greatest
The roll-call is a map of water scarcity meeting the means to fix it. The Gulf states built desalination into the foundation of modern cities in the desert; Spain leads Europe on reverse osmosis along its dry south coast; Israel now draws much of its drinking water from the Mediterranean; Australia built insurance plants after the Millennium Drought; and Chile desalinates the Pacific to feed the copper mines of the Atacama. (Counts are of named major plants, not capacity.)
Where the plants are mapped
These are the world’s major, namedplants — not a census. The real total is in the tens of thousands, and the Gulf’strue share is even larger than it looks here: it runs thousands of smaller units this set doesn’t name. In the other direction, a few well-documented countries — Chile and Spainespecially — show strongly because their plants are thoroughly catalogued on Wikidata. So read the regional counts as the shape of the major-plant world, with the Gulf under-counted and the best-documented countries over-counted.
About this data
Every plant comes from Wikidata (items that are an instance or subclass of “desalination plant” with coordinates, CC0). We tried OpenStreetMap first, the source behind most other Grid layers, but it maps only about two dozen desalination plants — far too few — so we used Wikidata’s catalogue of the named major plants instead. The type (cogeneration vs standalone) is derived from each item’s Wikidata classification: a plant is cogeneration when it is also classed as an integrated water-and-power plant or a power station, and standalone otherwise. There is no water-production-capacity figureon Wikidata for these, so — as with the LNG and refinery layers — this map does not invent a size hierarchy: every drop is the same size and the well-recorded type is the colour. Year shown is the recorded commissioning year where present. Operators are never shown. This is the major, named fleet, not a complete census — the Gulf’s real dominance is greater and the best-documented countries are over-represented. Snapshot taken 2026-06-27.