Offers better brine handling and produces higher-purity water, making it ideal for offshore green hydrogen production. Sustainable and efficient solution with low environmental impact.
Offers better brine handling and produces higher-purity water, making it ideal for offshore green hydrogen production. Sustainable and efficient solution with low environmental impact.
How do you handle the brine? “Minimal amounts” of brine is not an answer. What’s a minimal amount? What are you going to do with it? If you dump it back in the ocean, you increase salinity.
Why is increasing salinity of the ocean bad? Doesn’t that happen all the time on a much greater scale as ocean water evaporates into the atmosphere?
It’s bad. Very bad.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/salt-scourge-the-dual-threat-of-warming-and-rising-salinity
Your link (or at least what I’ve read from it) doesn’t cover why it would be bad to make the ocean saltier; it only talks about the rise of the salty ocean water.
I think it makes it pretty clear how increased salinity affects the climate, but here you go-
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2021GL095748
I’m not suggesting that it’s not bad, but that article didn’t seem to talk about rising ocean salinity.
I can’t find a better explanation anywhere for how it works than “it uses condensation”
So I have to guess the seawater is evaportated directly from the waters surface or something, which would just leave all the salts in there. That would be exactly as problematic as a traditional desalination plant pumping it’s brine back into the ocean. Maybe my guess about how it works is wrong though.
Yeah, it seems to me that you only have three options when it comes to the brine, and none of them are good- bury it and hope it doesn’t get into the water table, leave it where it is and hope it doesn’t leak, or dump it back in the ocean and increase ocean salinity. I don’t see another option.
I wonder how expensive shipping brine would be… Probably very until we can get it ludicrously concentrated.
But then I imagine we could take it somewhere like the middle of an uninhabitably hot desert and just fill up a low point in the topology. The combination of distance from where people live and dry hot conditions drying it out as fast as possible would possibly work?
It wouldn’t be worth it unless shipping the brine was cheaper than just shipping clean water from places that have it to places that don’t. But who knows.
The brine solution will contain concentrated amounts of elements, like lithium. That concentrated solution may be economicly viable to process.
Fine. What do you do about the salt?
We distribute it to fanbases across the internet, who are adept at managing it.
Most media requires a lot of salt to give to their users, we’ll never run out of demand for it
My idea was you take it to a played-out salt mine, and you just put it right back in.
I don’t know if that works with brine. But what I know is that many regions fill old mines with salt and heat it up with excess energy from solar in the summer to use as general energy storage and for heat in the winter. That might be a good way to repurpose the brine
I said this in another comment- I’d be very worried it would get into the water table. That brine is not just salt. It’s also full of toxins. But maybe there are good solutions that I don’t know about.
Yeah it was just something I came up with. We can only hope that someone will find a good solution on what to do with it