Saltwater corrodes firefighting equipment and may harm ecosystems, especially those like the chaparral shrublands around Los Angeles that aren’t normally exposed to seawater. Gardeners know that small amounts of salt – added, say, as fertilizer – does not harm plants, but excessive salts can stress and kill plants.
The problem with desalination is that there’s a super-concentrated salt sludge that needs to be discarded after the process. Dumping that back into the ocean creates excess salinity which fucks up the ecosystem in the immediate area.
Not saying that desalination isn’t a good idea, just that there’s more to think about than “put seawater in, get tap water out”.
Why cant it be turned into sea salt (the “spice”)?
I don’t know, but if I had to guess like everything else it comes down to money. It’s energy intensive to desalinate seawater to the degree it’s drinkable, and now we’re talking about adding even more energy to refine it even further to make it suitable for human consumption. That makes any recovered salt expensive compared to natural salt deposits. Much easier (read: cheaper) to just scrape salt deposits that have already evaporated.
It is. But there’s way more salt produced that way than the market wants to buy.
There is work to combine lithium extraction with desalination plants. We would also have more lithium than we would ever need for batteries.
Is there lithium in seawater?
In small amounts. It’s not economical at all to extract on it’s own, maybe as part of desalinization, but even then it’s probably marginal.
Yes, lots. More than we could use.
Artificial scarcity from Capitalism yet again!
I would imagine the thousands of cubic kilometers of freshwater currently entering the ocean from global warming far outbalances the little water we take from desalinization, and the net effect even if we put that salt back is quite a bit lower salinity.
For sure. All the freshwater needs in the world is soo tiny in comparison to the oceans that it would be completely impossible to even measure a rise of salinity in the oceans if we were to desalinate all our freshwater and dump the brine in the oceans. However, we can’t feasibly distribute the brine all over the oceans, so it would increase salinity locally and kill everything there.
Current regulations have outfall systems that dilute it below harmful levels as it’s dumped, plus there’s usage of the salt waste for chemical production, including chemicals used in the desalinization process.
Yes. But at the same time, we’re litteraly mining for salt, because it’s cheaper.
Actually, we’re also desalinating for salt. Here’s some evap ponds in San Diego.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/ncqgfQLsNpAGeExq5
There’s a bike trail that goes along side and cuts straight through those ponds I used to ride out to the Silver Strand when I lived in North Park.
Was super cool to see the ponds change week over week. But holy hell do they stink. Not as bad as some of the brackish mud flats around the Puget Sound, but they definitely have an aroma.