> RO desal splits the incoming ~3% salinity stream into two halves, one fresh and one ~6% salinity. This concentrated brine is fed to adjacent brine processing facilities (ideally in both countries) that exploit the region’s abundant solar and geothermal energy to extract potentially millions of tonnes of lithium, sodium, magnesium, chloride, and other metals found in sea water. The resulting depleted brine is piped…
In an environment where solar and geothermal electricity are abundant enough to make this work, it would be far easier to condense water straight from the air by refrigeration.
I think you’re underestimating how much less efficient that is.
You need pipes to spread it out. And I think you may be underestimating the scale and force of ocean currents. Every tide probably moves more water than California uses in a year.
I don't think the ocean is equally saline everywhere: https://salinity.oceansciences.org/maps-global.htm On average it's pretty close, but you can definitely get impacts from increased local salinity: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.16859 (just random ecamples) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/slaking-the-world... (view in incognito)
It sucks you guys home in on some weird issue for every promising technology. He literally addresses brine in the article.
He addresses brine, but not the waste products that come from brine, and only addresses it in one sentence: > The resulting depleted brine is piped back to the ocean where it is thoroughly mixed with sea water and discharged. This is not nearly as easy as this sentence implies.
Brine is just concentrated seawater. What waste products?
> RO desal splits the incoming ~3% salinity stream into two halves, one fresh and one ~6% salinity. This concentrated brine is fed to adjacent brine processing facilities (ideally in both countries) that exploit the region’s abundant solar and geothermal energy to extract potentially millions of tonnes of lithium, sodium, magnesium, chloride, and other metals found in sea water. The resulting depleted brine is piped…
In an environment where solar and geothermal electricity are abundant enough to make this work, it would be far easier to condense water straight from the air by refrigeration.
:D and if you scale this to the point where the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere is affected, you can also use some of the abundant energy to boil the ocean to replace that water vapor. :) Same net effect (water is taken from the ocean and salt is not) without actually moving the salt back and forth.
There should definitely be a plan for the brine. I'm optimistic we could: * Build ocean pipelines that disperse brine over much larger volumes of water to minimize impact on wildlife * Dump the brine water in engineered desert fields where it will evaporate and deposit salt reserves. In general, we should be aware of the whole lifecycle of a solution, and optimistically believe we can solve each problem with more wor…
> Dump the brine water in engineered desert fields where it will evaporate and deposit salt reserves. Honestly, the Salton Sea would be a great place to dump the brine. It would keep the water levels up and reduce the respiratory issues caused by drying, and any ecosystem to be destroyed has been thoroughly destroyed for decades. Nix the "turn the manmade salt lake to a manmade fresh lake" plan, and use the created f…
This is something I still don't understand about the original plan: Where is the Salton Sea expected to get more water from on an ongoing basis? If you keep extracting from it and not refilling it, it's just going to keep getting smaller and saltier. Agriculture isn't going to put back out as much as it takes in (the plants need it, after all). Sure, you can drag it out a few more years with desal, but eventually it's not going to be much of a sea, just a salty pile.
I am by no means a desalination expert, but pumping vast amount of a salty water 100+ kilometers (Pacific Coast) or from the Sea of Cortez (closer to 200kms) seems strange as compared to building the desalination plant on the shore and transfer the electricity generated in the desert. One can also replace some drinking or agricultural water used way closer to the coast in CA from the Colorado Basin with the newly des…
It sucks you guys home in on some weird issue for every promising technology. He literally addresses brine in the article.
It's a community of hackers passionate about the way things work. Picking it apart helps everyone understand the inputs and outputs of a system to understand how feasible it is, and what the tradeoffs are. What would you prefer, a generic "that's nice"? As far as I can tell, the author just kinda glossed over the brine situation. Some minerals can be sold, but his solution for the excess salt was just to turbulently…
It's a community of hackers passionate about the way things work. Picking it apart helps everyone understand the inputs and outputs of a system to understand how feasible it is, and what the tradeoffs are. What would you prefer, a generic "that's nice"? As far as I can tell, the author just kinda glossed over the brine situation. Some minerals can be sold, but his solution for the excess salt was just to turbulently…
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Well yes, that too. A mix of both, not sure of the percentages.
Frankly I wish there were a better place for the hackers to congregate without the capitalists. But whatever, at least the discussion here is civil and interesting. Best place I've found since Slashdot of old.