So have the Dutch, in Aruba.
Aruba has the best drinking water on Earth; all of Aruba's water is de-salinated seawater.
The process produces water so pure that they have to pass it over minerals to give it some taste.
This was not working with seawater but with a brine steam within an alternative energy production process at demonstration plant scale. I was scaling up in size to what it would take for full size production units.
I went through a prequalification step to ID companies with actual industrial scale expertise. Three companies were short listed to submit competitive bids. an US, an European and an Israeli company. For the bid evaluation step, I set up a grading process for the commercial and technical sections.
All three used ultrafiltration + reverse osmosis as the primary treatment with the concentrated brine going to a multi-effect evaporator and the permeate back to production. From the evaporator, most of the condensate was recycled back into production. A slip stream of condensate was polished with activated carbon then discharged as a treated wastewater under the terms of a discharge permit. A salt slurry was produced from the evaporator bottoms and fed to filter press units to produce a dry cake for landfill disposal.
The Israeli company had by far the best desalination technology. Multi-effect evaporation is a simple concept long used in industry but the devil is in the details and the Israeli technology in terms of evaporator design was way above the US and European competitors. Also, their resume of industrial scale installations world wide was more than the other two competitors combined. Business wise, the US company was selected because they were providing other pieces of the production plant thus could bundle everything together in a more competitive way cost wise.