71–80 of 230 posts
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You could just dilute it using fresh seawater, if you used enough and (maybe) spread it over a wider area. The amount of water people need for drinking is a relative drop in the ocean.
Brine doesn't necessarily behave the way you imagine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brinicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brine_pool
The paper: [1] They're still at lab scale in glass. They haven't built a usable system, even a small one. The big claim here is that it doesn't clog; capillary action moves the salt out of the active area to another area, where some yet to be developed mechanism removes it. That needs to be demonstrated. If they can come up with something that runs for years without clogging or replacing the active material, that's a…
It reminds me of how the Panama canal was built, and actually the first major attempt failed and they gave up. What they learned for the second attempt was that digging was not the hard(est) part to solve - it was how to move the dirt! So much dirt! Great book on this BTW: Path Between the Seas. I couldn't put it down.
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Great point, in my case in the PNW, the water from my local well is infested with manganese (as in clogging the household plumbing in the absence of a sediment filter) and other contaminants and the water company providing it is owned by private equity. Legally, I can drill my own well for non-potable irrigation, but god forbid I filter and/or chlorinate it for my own household use. So I end up considering options li…
You don't need to chlorinate water from your own well, unless maybe you have a cistern that you are filling for storage. And who's going to know if you are drinking it or watering your garden?
They are talking about lithium recovery, but there is a less exotic byproduct I'm interested in. One tonne (≈ 1 m^3) of seawater contains about 1.3 kilograms of magnesium, equivalent to about 4 kg of magnesite ore. Typical desal prices are on the order of $1 per tonne. Magnesite ore goes for about $100 per tonne, so the crude magnesium in a tonne of seawater is worth about $0.40, which could account for a substantial…
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I liked the idea of loading it up on a ship that sails out releasing as it goes out and back. Make it solar powered or even go old school with literal sails.
I thought they tend to pipe far out and discharge as far below the surface as possible, since there is a lot of surface life and it is less damaging this way. Ships (with long submerged pipes) would be prone to weather events and generally less reliable than an installed pipe. Perforation would be prone to clogging from build up so a nonstarter I would expect. Adding flex tubing and a relocation robot would be a main…
As for surface life, I'm no oceanographer, but is that really the most vulnerable place? The surface is where fresh water rain meets the ocean, so that would dilute the salinity during storms. However, there's nothing to say that another pump couldn't be pulling from the ocean and mixing the brine into that so it's diluted before and not just pouring brine straight into the ocean
Who all has access to a femto laser? As far as I know these are all patented, and most of those patents (or at the least companies with rights to production) are in the USA, according to a professor who told us so some years ago in university (in central Europe, but he is quite old already, so I am not sure if his information was 100% up to date; but otherwise I do not doubt the validity of his claim made). So someone is going to milk rather than help. Will be interesting to see what happens to that in some years. My current guesstimate is that nothing will really happen or change.
There is a fundamental minimum amount of energy needed to desalinate: you can't take less energy to do it,than you could gain back (from osmotic pressure) if you allowed the desalinated water to expand a cylinder containing the residual brine. This is large. This paper is a thermal method, so it doesn't have an electricity input, but to justify their efficiency claim, they should really compare against what you could…
Brine is very easy to dispose of: you just pump it back to where it came from. Solid crystalline salt, on the other hand, is a hassle.
Just put it on your fries.
Sand -> Glass -> heated saltwater -> freshwater + minerals -> ??? -> profit?
Combined with some mangrove farms, surely desert coasts are able to support more life.
Wonder if this is scalable tech, and how quickly it can 'process' water. I guess if they're combined with transparent solar panels, it could be quite an epic tech.
Always wondered why the coast of the Red Sea isn't littered with channels which get flooded with seawater, which then evpporate into glassed ceilings; creating freshwater, and leaving behind salts for mining. Sand -> Glass -> heated saltwater -> freshwater + minerals -> ??? -> profit? Combined with some mangrove farms, surely desert coasts are able to support more life. Wonder if this is scalable tech, and how quickl…
It's all gonna get on the glass (from above and below), and eventually the salt left behind is going to build up. The salt left behind is very hard on any structure or machinery used to move it which makes repairing the large glass enclosure a pain. All this for a slow trickle of water is generally not worth it.
Always wondered why the coast of the Red Sea isn't littered with channels which get flooded with seawater, which then evpporate into glassed ceilings; creating freshwater, and leaving behind salts for mining. Sand -> Glass -> heated saltwater -> freshwater + minerals -> ??? -> profit? Combined with some mangrove farms, surely desert coasts are able to support more life. Wonder if this is scalable tech, and how quickl…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea%E2%80%93Dead_Sea_Water...