Desalination can make saltwater drinkable

— but it won’t solve the U.S. water crisis

The water in the ocean is a tempting resource. Removing salt comes with
environmental and economic costs, though.

By Michael Birnbaum
September 28, 2021 at 1:34 p.m. EDT

Error! Filename not specified.

Waves crash near the Carlsbad Desalination plant in Carlsbad, Calif. The plant, opened more
than six years ago, transforms water from the Pacific Ocean into drinking water. (Sandy
Huffaker/Corbis/Getty Images)

Anybody with a 5-year-old’s knowledge of geography might come up against this conundrum:
There’s a water shortage in the Western United States. Right next door, there’s the Pacific
Ocean. Why can’t we take some of that big, blue body of water and move it into the increasingly
parched territory that borders it?

10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprint

The short answer, of course, is that there’s salt in the ocean, which isn’t good for people, plants
and many other living creatures. But as shortages mount, there’s increasing interest in the
complicated process of desalination, or pulling out salt on a massive scale so that water can be
put to use by the thirsty populations who live nearby.

What questions do you have about climate change? Ask them here.

Wells are drying up in California. The Colorado River is thinning to a dribble. The levels of
Lake Mead and Lake Powell — the two biggest reservoirs in the United States — are at record
lows.

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There is precedent for large-scale desalination: Persian Gulf countries such as Qatar have
precious little drinking water, and they have invested in the costly technology needed to filter the
salt out of saltwater and pass the cleaned-up liquid to their entire society.

“Desalination can be a sustainable way to replenish our water cycle,” wrote the authors of
a European Commission-backed study last year that argued for wider use of desalination around
the world, in partnership with efforts to minimize its environmental impact.
But the process is energy-intensive, costly and complicated to manage in an Earth-friendly way.
Here’s what you need to know.

So what is desalinated water, anyway?

Desalination is the process of getting salt out of saltwater so that it’s drinkable and usable on
land. There are two main techniques: You can boil the water, then catch the steam, leaving
behind the salt. Or you can blast the water through filters that catch the salt but let the liquid
through. The latter is the more modern process, but both methods use a lot of energy.

Flint has replaced over 10,000 lead pipes. Earning back trust is proving harder.

And is desalinated water safe to drink?

Generally, yes. Desalinated water, provided that it’s clean, is perfectly fine to drink, and a lot of
it is already being consumed both in the United States and abroad. San Diego inaugurated a vast
new desalination plant about six years ago and is on the verge of approving another. Other plants
dot the West Coast. Desalination has been in use in energy-rich, freshwater-poor parts of the
world for decades — about half of global production is concentrated in the Middle East and
North Africa. A United Nations-sponsored study from 2018 estimated that the world produces
about 25 billion gallons of desalinated water every day — enough to fill the taps of 25 New York
Cities.

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A desalination plant in the Omani port city of Sur. (Sultan Al-Hasani/AFP/Getty Images)

But cleaning up the water isn’t challenge-free. Salt isn’t the only thing that hangs out in
seawater: There’s also often a lot of boron, which isn’t good for crops and in large
concentrations might be unhealthy for humans. And it isn’t always easy to clean saltwater. Other
contaminants can also get in.

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“There is an urgent need to make desalination technologies more affordable and extend them to
low-income and lower-middle-income countries,” Vladimir Smakhtin, director of the United
Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health, wrote after he co-wrote the
U.N. study on desalination. “At the same time, though, we have to address potentially severe
downsides of desalination — the harm of brine and chemical pollution to the marine
environment and human health.”

Why do people get excited about desalination?

At its best, desalination is an attractive technology: It takes a relatively abundant but unusable
resource, seawater, and turns it into something useful for freshwater-starved regions. And as time
passes, it’s becoming more efficient, less costly and more possible to fuel with renewable
energy, easing the environmental impact. Eventually, backers hope, extracting the minerals from
the high-salt leftovers will become economically viable, even though it’s usually not right now.

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At best, said the authors of the European Commission study, desalination can be “a far-reaching,
climate change mitigating, water security solution.”

Is desalination bad for the environment?

Opponents of desalination have long said that the technique isn’t a panacea because it hurts the
environment even as it cleans up water for human consumption. There are a few big challenges.
Pulling saltwater into desalination plants can hurt fish and other marine life if it isn’t done
carefully. Then there’s the energy needed to clean up the water, and the brackish, salty waste that
is left after the clean water is filtered out.

Proponents of desalination “think it’s table salt. They think the ocean can sustain the damage, but
over 50 years, the ocean cannot sustain the damage, and neither can the atmosphere,” said Susan
Jordan, the executive director of the California Coastal Protection Network and a longtime critic
of big desalination projects in her state.

The world’s biggest plant to capture CO2 from the air just opened in Iceland
There’s no question that desalination is energy-intensive. And if that energy comes from dirty
sources, desalination can lead to a paradoxical outcome: It can unleash greenhouse gases,
worsening global warming, increasing droughts and therefore the need for more desalination.

Error! Filename not specified.

The Sydney Desalination Plant in Kurnell, Australia. (Brook Mitchell/Getty Images)

The most modern desalination plants use significantly less energy than their predecessors.

And proponents are looking for ways to use renewable energy to power the process.

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A separate challenge is brine, the hyper-concentrated, salty fluid that is flushed away from the
freshwater. If it is simply pumped straight back into the sea, the dense substance sinks to the
bottom of the ocean floor and suffocates marine life. There are techniques to spread it over
greater territory in the sea, diluting its impact.

“We call it the blanket of death because it settles on the floor, and it kills everything,” Jordan
said.

Pets can help fight climate change with an insect-based diet. Owners just need to come
around to the idea.

Can desalination solve the water crisis?

Alone, no. But it might help as part of a broader range of efforts to cut water use and increase
water supplies. Its technologies are growing more energy-efficient, and there are new ways to
reduce the environmental harm of the salty wastewater. And it could be used in especially
parched parts of the world where water is desperately needed and where there are few
alternatives.
 Advertisement
“The benefits of desalination go beyond the single-use value of the water produced,” the authors
of the European Commission study argued last year, advocating for wider use of desalination in
more-vulnerable and poorer regions of the globe. The technology can provide “plentiful water
for human use, with all the benefits that entails, while helping preserve and restore ecosystems.”

But in the United States, even proponents of the technology say desalination is likely to supply
only a sliver of the American West’s water needs in the coming years, leaving some of the
biggest water users — notably the agriculture industry — to look for water elsewhere.

Los Angeles recently unveiled a $3.4 billion proposal to recycle and reuse its wastewater, for
example, instead of treating the waste and pumping it into the ocean, as is currently done.
Advocates say the change would significantly ease the pressure on the city’s water sources
farther north in California and the Colorado River — all without the need to lean more heavily
on desalination.

“Conservation, recycling, all of those things are important first,” Jordan said. “And if you can’t
solve your water supply problem, then that’s when we say, ‘Do desal, but do it right.’”

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By Michael Birnbaum
Michael Birnbaum is a climate reporter for The Washington Post. He previously served more
than a decade in Europe as the newspaper's bureau chief in Brussels, Moscow and Berlin,
reporting from more than 40 countries. He joined The Post in 2008. Twitter
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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
More numbers:

Somewhere between 4 and 7 kilowatt-hours, for well designed systems. That’s assuming you are
looking at the energy cost of a single cubic meter in a system designed to pump several million
cubic meter.
From QWuora.

That's a cubic meter of sea water pumped upo 500 feet and inland 500 miles.

[Cubic Meters] symbol/abbrevation: (m3) How to convert Cubic Miles to Cubic Meters (mi3

to m3)? 1 mi3 = 4168000000 m3. 1 x 4168000000 m3 = 4168000000 Cubic Meters.

That's 7 terrawatt hours of energy.

Considerably less than the nine terrawatt hours available from an AP 1000 reactor.

We are well on our way.

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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
(Edited)
And while we can still post, herewith a long view of the solution.

Las Vegas eats eighht gigawatts on a normal day. South Tahoe and Reno together might need as
mucg power, so we put 20 AP1000 reactors out on the Nevada test range and cool them with sea
water. We will need to pump five cubic miles of sea water, and thus geta cubic mile of 25%
brine residue for four reactors, so we will need to pump 20 cubic miles per year to provide the
energy for Nevada, and maybe enough for Arizona as well.

We are going to need to flood the Imperial Valley. But at the"Make Riverside a major sea port"
solution, a mile wide and 100 feet deep channel to Inyo and around to Palm Desert.
But at a current of three feet per minute that channel can move 200 cubic miles of sea water a
year into the interior, so we can well afford our goal of five hundred cubic miles of sea water
sequestered per year for the United States.

Dream big, Build bigger.

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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
And one more piece of data for the pie:

The AP1000 is
a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressurized_water_reactorhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
AP1000#cite_note-Schulz-8 with two cooling loops, planned to produce a net power output of
1,117 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt#Conventions_in_the_electric_power_industry.https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000#cite_note-AP1000-presentation-18 It is an evolutionary
improvement on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP600,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
AP1000#cite_note-AP_1000_Public_Safety-9 essentially a more powerful model with roughly
the same footprint.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000#cite_note-Schulz-8

A design objective was to be less expensive to build than

other https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor designs, by both using existing
technology, and needing less equipment than competing designs that have three or four cooling
loops. The design decreases the number of components, including pipes, wires, and valves.
Standardization and type-licensing should also help reduce the time and cost of construction.
Because of its simplified design compared to a Westinghouse generation II PWR, the AP1000
has:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000#cite_note-AP1000-presentation-18

Translation, we need just one reactor to pump the seawater up hill in cubic mile quantities.

And coolant for the reactorcooling system will evaporate a cubic mile of sea water on site.

So we won't need several reactors per cubic mile of sea water.

And this is a run safe reactor, loss of the coolanyt loop won't melt down the core.

Now all we need is to get started.

Dream big. Build Bigger.

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willis.alland
2 years ago
One of the largest desal plants in the US is in Tampa Bay. The discharge is dumped directly back
into the bay. It has been studied intensively for decades and observed environmental impacts are
noise in the data. Perhaps the author could have referenced actual published data instead of
hyperbolic clickbait from an anti desal crusader. It’s not a panacea but it can be a darn good
solution.
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ideajdevi
2 years ago
Thanks for the information on de-salinization. I've wondered for a while now, given the issues.
Rather than fighting over earth-cooking oil-pipelines, we should be using pipelines for water...so
we can plant more trees.
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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
Sometimes we don't even need pipelines. A short channel from the Sea of Cortez to the Mojave
basin floods the entire imperial and Coachella valleys, which are below sea level and in danger
of one inoportune earthquake from flooding anyway. That creates a bay 1600 square miles, and
thus starts evaporating foiur cubic miles of sea water a year, most of which gets moved by the
SW Moonsoon up over Arizona all the way to the Four Corners region.
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roadrunner66
2 years ago
I can't find a single reference to the actual cost per m^3 or alternatively , cost in energy
kWh/m^3.

Desalination, also Aluminum smelting (another good article in today's WaPo) could be used as
'batteries' that could smooth at least a portion of the periodic unavailability of solar and wind.

The problem is to build plants that are so cheap, that they can operate at least somewhat
economically for just 10 hours out of the 24 hours of the day, i.e. when sun and wind are
plentiful.
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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
Cost of what?
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roadrunner66
2 years ago
Desalination...
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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
My cost calculates out to less than a billion dollars a cubic mile removed from the sea and
sequestered.

That basically means a cubic mile of fresh water pumped to a place where it will be used, plus
another cubic mile of sea water sesalinated in cooling the power plany, one A1000p power
reactor.

Doing things in cubic feet, cubic meters, or acre feet merely gives rise to wierd numbers which
are quite hard to wrap ones mind around.
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READ MORE OF THIS CONVERSATION >
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nukedglenn
2 years ago
This provides some information on cost.

https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2019/09/f66/73355-7.pdf
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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
86 | Desalination
7. Desalination Key Findings
• Desalination is an energy-intensive process because of the energy required to separate salts and
other
dissolved solids from water. In operation, the actual pressure required is approximately two
times the
osmotic pressure; for seawater, this translates to about 800–1,000 pounds per square inch. The
energy
required to run pumps that can achieve these high pressures account for approximately 25% to
40% of
the overall cost of water (Lantz, Olis, and Warren 2011).
• Wave- or tidal-powered desalination could be used to directly pressurize seawater without
generating
electricity for a reverse-osmosis system, eliminating one of the largest cost drivers for the
production of
desalinated water.
• There are two primary market segments for desalination: water utilities and isolated or small-
scale
distributed systems. Large-scale desalination systems require tens of megawatts to run and
provide tens
of million gallons of desalinated water per day. Small-scale systems vary in size from tens to
hundreds of
kilowatts and provide hundreds to thousands of gallons of water per day.
More coroboration.
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Dr_BeetleBob
2 years ago
Supposedly the Israelis have been able to get the cost of desalinized sea water down to around 50
cents per cubic meter, which might be expensive for large-scale crop irrigation but should be
reasonable for domestic use. Power your desalination plants with solar arrays - on the roof, at the
very least.

The brine can then be a feedstock for mineral extraction. The chlorine is certainly marketable,
and there is lots more dissolved in sea water than sodium chloride. Consider that the low-
molecular-weight hydrocarbons in gasoline used to be a waste product from kerosene
production. When you get lemons, make lemonade!
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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
The most valuable thing in brine, by volume especially is hydrogen, which by number of atoms
is nearly half of the contents. It is the "fuel of the future" and the most simple and probably
cheapest way to get it is electrolytic decomposition.

When you have drawn off all the hydrogen the very next element that starts appearing at the
hydrogen electrodes is lithium. That we need in great quantiity. Now we get to Sodium, which
we store in nitrogen or argon, we will. need lots of it. as these are coming off the negative
electrode Oxygen, fluorine and chlorine are coming off the other end. We pump the fluorine and
chlorine back into the electrolytic cell as an electron carrier.

By now we have greatly reduced the volume of the residue, but we have pumped a lot of water
through first, so we started with lots of ore to process.

Now we combine the contents of two or more cells and keep on processing.

All along some metals are saturating and settling out. They are mostly coinage metals centered
around Gold and silver.

processing this way we slowly strip out elements one by one. when we get done there is nothing
left.

But that process is not really a part of desalination, except for pulling off the hydrogen, which
when burned produces water.
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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
And:

https://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrEeR48FFZhCgsADQ4PxQt.;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzI
EdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Ny/RV=2/RE=1633060029/RO=10/RU=https%3a%2f
%2fwww.justintools.com%2funit-conversion%2fvolume.php%3fk1%3dcubic-miles
%26k2%3dcubic-meters/RK=2/RS=lSU0kVJkoW0fWHFIy1RH2.3VTac-

[Cubic Meters] symbol/abbrevation: (m3) How to convert Cubic Miles to Cubic Meters (mi3

to m3)? 1 mi3 = 4168000000 m3. 1 x 4168000000 m3 = 4168000000 Cubic Meters

 At $.50 that means the Isrealis can desalinate a cubic mile of sea water at $2 billion and
change.

 Do that at large scale, using waste heat capture, and you get the cost below a billion a cubic
mile, and actually, since the power used to move the sea water around evaporates another cubic
mile of sea water, we are down to $500 million a cubic mile of water removed from the sea and
sequestered.

 The costs look better and better, because those costs include the onetime costs of the
infrastructure. That gets amortized over a period of years.

 Allowing for amortization, can we get the costs below 100 million dollars a cubic mile of seas
water removed?

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roadrunner66
2 years ago
End consumers in Germany pay a lot more than that per m^3 of water (it rains a lot there) at 1.60
Euros.
So the real cost would be carbon cost. If we had plants cheap enough to just run when the sun is
shining and the wind blowing salination would not be a problem.
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roadrunner66
2 years ago
The WaPo article also exaggerates the brine problem. It is really just a distribution problem, as
the sun evaporates ocean water every day. The distribution has costs, of course, so the further
off-shore you have intakes and outlets , the better.
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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
You want the uptakes as close to shore as possible, and skimmimg height so you pull in surface
waters, which are warmer than water from even a little below the surface.
And of coiurse we won't dump the brine back into the sea because it is just too valuable.
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Adrian Havill
2 years ago
You put the brine in a used, clean oil tanker (80,000 gallons) and go out between fifty and 100
miles to a dead spot in the ocean. Dump it, repeat.
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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
(Edited)
And thus you throw away billions of dollars of valuable minerals and elements that we seriously
need to keep our thoroughly connected culture going.

Just plain dumb.

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Smslaw
2 years ago
That would be a very small oil tanker. Just the expense for fuel and labor (it would require
American crews) would be prohibitive for each trip. And it would take a lot of trips.
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Climber67
2 years ago
Why are people so obsessed with living in areas that do not really support human life (at least not
in such numbers)?
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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
Because, being a highly inventive species, we can do it.
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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
Mesopotamia and Harrappa are the earliest large scale examples of our doing it.
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roboturkey
2 years ago
ah yes. Speculating about super expensive high tech solutions to too many people living in arid
areas. Might as well throw all your money into expensive desalinization plants, eh? Nothing
vulnerable about that, is there?
How about focusing on waste first. Green green lawns and golf courses in the desert are
laughable. Car washes in desert areas are laughable. And huge urban areas with needs for water
that does not exist are at best unwise. But here we are, realizing that too many humans and our
penchant to pee in the soup have trashed a livable planet.

Thanks for the informative read. I thought that desalinization was a really cool idea before this
article. Now I see the pearl clutching eco warriors will fight this too. Solution: edibles and craft
beer. all the time.
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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
So you went in with an attitude and nothing anyone here says changes your attitude, which is you
ought to be telling the rest of us how and where to live?

Sorry, we have no reason at all to pay any attention to you.

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Displayed Name
2 years ago
Thanks for making zero sense Keyboard Warrior
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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
(Edited)
Having established that desalination is the answer, let's look at what one cuboc mile of sea water
can do.

It can irrigate 1200 square miles of farmland to 4 "a month, about as much as Ohio gets in a
month,

If you insist on thinking acres, thats roughly 3/4 of a million acres.

Irrigate to just two inches a month double that number.

2400 square miles is a rectangle 60 x 40 miles. do that four times, and you irrigate the north end
of the central valley down eighty miles.

To do that you need four pipelines, all going up and over the coastal range, or up along rivers
where the river originates east ot the coast range. That takes four gigawatt power plants, and in
the process evaporates four cubic miles of sea water, much of which rains out on the western
slopes of the coastal range. you take 3/4ths of that water out during desalination, and have a
cubic mile of sea water a year at goose lake to process for hydrogen. the other three cubic miles
irrigate 3600 square miles of farm land at two inches of water a month.
Doing that, and you need to go down the Sacramento River to about half way and build a dry
dam virtually all the way across the valley, with the through the dam drains buried in about ten
feet of pea grtavel, so that the river is backed enough to strip much of the silt out and put clean
water flowing back into the Sacramento river. The siltation basin gets farmed intensively, but
nobody gets to live on the flood plane unless they build on a hill or mound above maximum
planned flood level. This puts the flooded land in prime rice growing territory, so nothing serious
happens to the farming in the area, just that farmers live on mounds and are prepared to get
around by air boat.

That costs perhaps five billion dollars, maybe with 60% of the money coming from the feds, so
three billion dollars federaol funds and two billion dollars state funds.

Seems to be a viable project.

Let's get started.

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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
(Edited)
Note, by the way, that five billion dollars for infrastructure gets amortized over perhaps tewnty
years, or even over the forty year life span of the reactors we will use, so we are actually talking
mere hundreds of millions of funding every year.

Not only doable, but actually cheap.

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Smslaw
2 years ago
Reactors? Are you suggesting that we use nuclear power to desalinate? Five billion dollars won't
buy one GW plant, let alone four. Vogtle has already cost around ten billion per GW and it's not
done yet.
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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
We do short circuit the legalese, both because time is of the essence and because costs are of the
essence.

That really brings down the costs.

And we site the reactors on Federal Lands, to avoid any private property takings.

Because whatever else is true, we need to be doing all this instanters, emergency,
ewmergency,emergency and all that.
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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
Actual time to build for the vogtle reactor should have been about three years.

No technical problems delayed it, just endless lawsuits by no nuke fanatics.

Them we ignore.
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JustAnotherJim
2 years ago
Desalination could, conceivably, and only at great cost and over considerable time, supply the
household and commercial business needs of cities along the California coast. Which is not to
say it shouldn’t be pursued. But supplying the needs of agriculture and industry, as well as inland
cities, would require investment of money and time massively beyond what even this very rich
nation could afford (leaving aside whether the other 49 states would be much interested in
helping pay for it). Qatar and the UAE are extremely rich, have small populations, and very little
industry or agriculture. They are poor examples for California’s problems. The drought is upon
us now, and according to another story posted this morning, is expected to continue and likely
worsen. We don’t have time to build this immense desal infrastructure before we’re over the
cliff. So sure, build desal plants for the cities, but in the meantime, conservation and change are
the only viable answers.
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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
(Edited)
It's been established that a billion dollars a cubic mile of desalinated water is a probable cost, and
if it isn't a billion a cubic mile it is less, not more.

Now spending a billion dollars, government or private, employs in the neighborhood of 20,000
people directly and another 30,000 people when those first 20,000 people spend their wages.

California's employment will need every body they can find.

So no, it isn't all that costly, and amazingly enough, recycling the water means we first use it for
other needs in the central valley, and then pump the effluent out on the fields as irrigation.

The more you consider the project the more important it becomes to get this done.
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LES IL
2 years ago
(Edited)
I have a distinct impression that there a lot of people writing comments that know very little.
Underlying many of our problems is the fact that there just too many people on this planet.
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roboturkey
2 years ago
your perceptions, Sherlock, seem spot on
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Tothestars
2 years ago
Three words: TOO MANY PEOPLE...put birth control into the desalinized water, stand back,
and see the wonderful results!
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perspectiveisintheeyeofthestorm
2 years ago
The photo of Carlsbad, CA is of the old power plant; the new desalination plant sits behind the
building seen.
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ipfreely
2 years ago
Gee, if only we'd seen this coming for decades and planned ahead... No, apparently, the
American way is to ignore the problem until it becomes a crisis, and then bemoan the fact that
none of the solutions are perfect.
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ByOakBay
2 years ago
If people truly cared about water shortages in southern California, then the starting point would
be the year-round banning of watering lawns - from residential through to golf courses.

Crocodile tears are well-deserved with the USA's continued high waste of living (household
consumption through to agriculture) in your arid regions.
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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
Another solution by telling everyone else how they must live their lives.

Unnecessary, just pay to desalinate sea water, it is more than affordable, and its overall
ecological results area side benefit (or are the main target and lots of fresh water is the
unintended collateral "damage")
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PacNW Refugee
2 years ago
Hilariously, the proposed desalination plant in Huntington Beach stipulates that the ratepayers
have to buy the water produced, like it or not, needed or not.

Privatize the profits, socialize the losses, as usual.

If Poseidon is so convinced that this is a money maker, they should build it on spec and hope for
the best.
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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
Every municiple water system in the country forces the residents of the municipality to buy its
water, need it or want it or not.

Doesn't matter, public, quasi public, or private.

Its how public water systems work.

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Jack Hamilton 1
2 years ago
agreed, and if you want green grass, get AstroTurf
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roboturkey
2 years ago
or move to Louisiana
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Whip of Christ
2 years ago
I wouldn't worry about water shortage. We have so mismanaged our resources and our inability
to even manage a little pandemic are all signs that will lead to a major drop in the world
population over the next century. I won't be here but I suspect neither will 90% of you.
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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
Tell, by the end of the century you are right, but we will have been replaced by many more of us
than have died off.
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DragonFire
2 years ago
The "Modern" approach to high volume desalination is NOT Distillation - its Reverse Osmosis.
Its all about pumps, pressure & membranes to stage wise separate the water from solids &
dissolved chemicals. While sea salt may be "Highly Desirable" - where you take the seawater
from determines the volume of pollutants that will end up in the salts (potentially making them
less desirable / healthy). Since the time of the Phoenicians (4000+ years), "Brine" (in their case
Sea Water) has been sun dried over plots of land to extract the salts & minerals from salt water,
and this process can be used with the brine left over from Reverse Osmosis. The evaporation
(drying) could even be accelerate using "Concentrated Solar Power" - lenses to focus sunlight
onto the brine beds.
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We_are_not_Amused
2 years ago
I can't believe they cannot come up with an idea to repurpose the brine. Dry it and make roads
out of it or somrthing similar.
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ESteeleAZ
2 years ago
May be worth looking into. But watch out for rainy days.
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Fredilly
2 years ago
The brine will eventually seep into freshwater wells and aquifers making the problem worse.
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Ceflynline2
2 years ago
(Edited)
Process the brine on an endohoeric basin, one with no outlet for the water, and it merely falls on
ground already "poluted" with salt.

Remove just the Alkalai metals and earths, all of which have commercial value, and you have
significantly reduced the amount of material you need to sort, and as you acrue that material, it
becomes economically worth processing the salts further.

You don't pollute anything.

But processing just for hydrogen, then lithium significantly reduces the material you have to
work with.
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Smslaw
2 years ago
The amount of brine produced by your cubic mile of sea water is laughable, in the neighborhood
of a hundred million tons.
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