The water shortage problem is one that's shared around the world, and many countries have come up with a solution: drinking from the sea. The process to make salt water drinkable is called desalination. It is being used more and more, especially in the Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, or southeast Asian countries such as Singapore. Over 80 million cubic meters of freshwater flow out of desalination plants around the world daily.

Two main methods to get the salt out of water are reverse osmosis or RO, and multistage distillation - MSF. These two processes provide nearly 90 percent of all desalinated water.

Let's quickly go through the science of each one.In a reverse osmosis desalination plant, Seawater is pre-treated, and suspended particles are removed. Then it undergoes reverse osmosis which use semi-permeable membranes and pressure to separate salt from water. The multi-stage flash method however,uses heat to convert salt water into fresh water.

"Flash" refers to rapidly bringing the water to a boil, and this happens in stages. During each stage, water vapor forms and is collected.The water produced by these two different processes is very pure and is re-mineralized in the third stage. And after that, the freshwater is ready to drink.

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