I often hear about desalination as an energy problem, since the plants use so much to run. I'd be interested to know if this technology would lower the energy requirements of desalination. Anyone read the paper?
PS: You can also extract energy by mixing salt and fresh water, so the minimum energy to separate them must be greater than that.
Can you expand on what you mean by this please? The ideal Carnot cycle describes the fundamental thermodynamic maximum for extracting work from heat.
I thought that applied across all state changes (i.e. not just in equilibrium situations)?
Usually that means increasing price, but the what the commenter above was saying is that often we're making it artificially cheaper. Often by either subsidizing things w/ our taxes (hiding the cost), or by not adequately funding the collection, which will eventually cause failure or exhaustion of the supply.