Demand for freshwater has increased globally and substantially due to the increased population as well as the large expansion in industrial activities. The depletion of fresh groundwater inspires humans to find an alternative water supply. Ocean water has a huge potential of becoming an alternative water resource provided appropriate and adequate desalination technology. Desalination is a separation process that reduces the total dissolved solids (TDS), i.e. salts content of saline water to an acceptable level. The most common desalination methods are thermal distillation processes such as Multi-Effect Distillation(MED), Multi-Stage Flash (MSF), and filtration processes such as Reverse Osmosis (RO), Electro-Dialysis (ED), Membrane Distillation (MD). In thermal distillation, saline water is heated until water vapor separates from the salt and the other components. A filtration method involves applying a high pressure to push saline water through a filter and separate water from salt. The biggest concern that prevents desalination processes from becoming mainstream is their high capital expenditures due to the extremely high energy consumption.

A desalination process involves three liquid streams: feedwater, processed, and brine. The energy requirements, which determine project economics, vary depending on the feedwater type. For an RO process, the initial pressurization of the feedwater makes up the majority of the energy consumption. Various benchmarking studies and economic analyses were conducted around the globe, and the results indicate the development of an industrial hybrid system coupling freezing/hydrate and reverse osmosis as a future aspired technology as seawater can be processed to brackish water before going to an RO process. In 2018, Babu and his team concluded that the coupling of freezing and RO reduces the total energy consumption by 4 times. As the hydrate crystals contain a smaller quality of salts compared to the feedwater.