Xinhua News Agency, Beijing (Reporter Wang Libin) From traditional sea salt extraction to emerging lithium, uranium and other metal extraction, the utilization of seawater resources in my country, which is “asking for water from the sea”, is opening up a new space for “looking for minerals from the sea”.

On World Oceans Day, June 8, the Ministry of Natural Resources released the "2025 National Seawater Utilization Report", which shows that as a strategic emerging industry, my country's seawater desalination and comprehensive utilization industry is growing day by day. New results have been achieved in large-scale engineering utilization, core technology breakthroughs, industrial chain construction, and policy and standard system construction, and the industry development momentum is strong.

The report pointed out that relevant scientific research institutes, universities and enterprises have also actively carried out research on the extraction of trace elements such as lithium, uranium and deuterium from seawater, and have made breakthroughs in basic theoretical research and key technology research. In 2025, my country's seawater uranium extraction will achieve the extraction of kilogram-level uranium products in a real marine environment.

According to industry estimates, the total reserves of uranium in seawater are about 4.5 billion tons, which is more than a thousand times that of terrestrial uranium mines. It is called the "blue uranium library." In the long run, the economic and efficient development of seawater uranium resources is of great significance. This marks the accelerated expansion of my country's seawater resource utilization from a single "freshwater supply" to a two-wheel drive of "freshwater + strategic resources".

Xiang Wenxi, director of the Tianjin Seawater Desalination and Comprehensive Utilization Research Institute of the Ministry of Natural Resources, said that there are currently 167 seawater desalination projects in my country, with a project scale of 3.077 million tons per day; the annual seawater cooling water consumption reaches 193.36 billion tons, an increase of 86.4% from 2020. "Blue Sweet Spring" effectively guarantees domestic water supply for major industries such as coastal thermal power, nuclear power, and steel, as well as water-scarce islands.

He said that seawater desalination, with stable water supply and flexible scale, is an important way to solve the global water crisis, and "asking for water from the sea" has become the consensus of all countries. Desalination is a "faucet" to quench thirst, and it is also a "liquid mine" of strategic resources. Tianjin, Hebei, Shandong and other places rely on large-scale desalination projects to vigorously promote the comprehensive utilization of concentrated brine. The large-scale potassium extraction and bromine extraction projects from seawater are steadily advancing, and strategic element extraction technologies such as lithium extraction and deuterium extraction from seawater are being tackled one after another. Tianjin has launched the international cooperation project "Research on Key Technologies for Extracting Magnesium from Seawater/Concentrated Salt Brine from China", and an industrial pattern for efficient development of multi-dimensional resources is taking shape.

Xiang Wenxi said that during the "15th Five-Year Plan" period, we will continue to strengthen the leadership of scientific and technological innovation, promote the iterative upgrade of domestic technical equipment, strengthen the technical reserves for the extraction of strategic seawater elements, and contribute the "Chinese solution" to solve the global shortage of fresh water and strategic resources.