Saudi Thirst for Water Is Creating a Toxic Brine Problem

Post by itcmcgrath » Wed, Jan 09, 2019, 10:32 PM UTC

ryanmercer wrote: post #27

swebs wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about dumping it into a shallow pit and letting the water evaporate, creating new salt flats.

>Saudi Arabia emits 31.5 million cubic meters of liquid effluent a day You'd need some massive pits and you'd have to displace way more than 31.5 million cubic meters of soil as it isn't all going to evaporate in a day. Ideally you'd want really shallow pools so you'd eat up an insane surface area. For some reference an Olympic sized swimming pool is about 2,500 cubic meters so you'd need 12,600 (pools) just to hold…

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 2:23 AM UTC

Retric wrote: post #51

philipkglass wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The local sewage systems can't deal with volumes this large. The sewage systems of the entire UK, population 66 million, deal with about 11 billion liters per day: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... Saudi Arabia, with a population of only 33 million, isn't going to have sewage systems sized to accommodate 31.5 billion liters of waste brine.

You would mix after the sewage treatment, simply placing the pipes next to each other would work. As to impact the quality of brine is less important than the amount of surplus salt. Sea water is ~3.5% salt. You need 1:1 fresh water produced to get back to the default at discharge. While a significant fraction of the water produced would be lost as evaporation etc, desalination is not their only source of water. Edit…

Post by yesenadam » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 3:54 AM UTC

hughdbrown wrote: post #14

> Saudi Arabia’s desalination plants produce about 31.5 million cubic meters of contaminated water each day. That volume of liquid, most of which is pumped back into the ocean, is equivalent to about 20 million barrels of oil a day, or, double the amount of crude it currently produces I don't understand the math. 31.5e6 cubic meters * 1e3 liters/cubic meter = 31.5e9 liters 31.5e9 liters / 3.78 liters/gallon = 8333333…

  bash$ units
  You have: m^3
  You want: barrels
        * 6.2898108
        / 0.15898729

Post by mikhailfranco » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 6:28 PM UTC

swebs wrote: post #17

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it's just extra salty it's still a local problem. You can't just dump it all in the ocean because it would still kill everything. You'd need to dump it out slowly or over a much wider area for the concentration not to be harmful. It's like a polluted river killing everything where it dumps out even if the amount of pollution is inconsequential overall.

How about dumping it into a shallow pit and letting the water evaporate, creating new salt flats.