111–120 of 230 posts
you can now extract (like mining) minerals from the ocean, sounds kind of dangerous for the ecosystem maybe? making it profitable to extract magnesium, lithium, salt... we can probably guess how this story goes. i'm hoping it doesn't scale, honestly.
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Slightly different idea to take Red Sea water, concentrate it, and flow into the Dead Sea to stabilize the water level in the Dead Sea which is a big problem. A billion or so was spent but the project is on hold for some combination of financial, political and environmental issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea%E2%80%93Dead_Sea_Water...
I love projects like this. A shame the west has handed over the baton to the Chinese and Saudis when it comes to actually being daring with megaprojects. Some over stuff whhich are cool to read about: Redirecting Siberian rivers into Central Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_river_reversal Redirecting Congo basin rivers to replenish Lake Chad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Chad_replenishment_projec... F…
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I love projects like this. A shame the west has handed over the baton to the Chinese and Saudis when it comes to actually being daring with megaprojects. Some over stuff whhich are cool to read about: Redirecting Siberian rivers into Central Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_river_reversal Redirecting Congo basin rivers to replenish Lake Chad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Chad_replenishment_projec... F…
The Saudis aren't "daring" with megaprojects. They're fucking[1] stupid[2]. Saying their megaprojects are "daring" is like saying I'm "daring" for claiming I'm going to build a catapult that will launch me to the moon. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojena [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line,_Saudi_Arabia
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Through the magic of Googling "Persian Gulf salinity" it seems like it's more that it's a shallow Gulf in a dry area so it has significant evaporation. Desalination does effect it but it's only a few percent of the total evaporation (which is still surprisingly big) and doesn't sound like the main driving factor or an imminent ecological concern. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/marine-science/articles... https:/…
pardon my ignorance. But, all that salt was there already. right? Is it that we have less water there now ?
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Seems like you could run a long perforated tube to diminish that effect.
The short version is brine is weird: it's surprisingly resistant to diffusing and tends to flow more like an immisicible fluid. So you have to put quite a lot of effort into getting it to actually disperse rather then just fall to the seafloor.
Alternatively, in the absence of sensible regulations a cutthroat operator devoid of ethics constructs a plant that dumps concentrated brine in the immediate vicinity because that's the cheapest approach. Then reactionary elements raise talking points about environmental damage and pretend that it's a difficult problem to solve. Business as usual.
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> Brine is very easy to dispose of: you just pump it back to where it came from. Easy, but not necessarily good for the spot you're pumping concentrated salt back into.
Maybe, but dumping crystalline salt is even worse to the spot you’re dumping it on.
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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.
Why? Just build mountains out of it and maybe even open a salt-ski park in the tropics for people who don't have snow.