What is the expected timeline for desalination technology? Even with continued investment all efforts have seemed to plateau at some point when costs and feasibility reaches a critical point.
Israel went from having severe water shortages if there was no rain (plus environmental damage from overdrawing lakes) to being perfectly fine.
And the costs are not too bad either.
Israel also is the world leaded by far in controlling water leaks, which helps reduce water demand, and they also reuse greywater for farming.
Other places with water shortages could do the same.
As that stuff comes from the ocean one might suggest it goes back into it at a controlled rate.
The biggest challenge I'd read about had been energy costs, so this headline appears to be great news.
... what are you going use to dilute the brine? The water you just desalinated? What's the point then?
Seems to me if your input is seawater, and your output is a separated-out set of {fresh water, saltier sea water}, and you put the saltier sea water back in the sea, you're going to create a localized concentration of high salinity, no? Seems kind of unavoidable to me.
One interesting ancillary benefit of having a source of brine is that it makes extracting desired minerals and elements from seawater much cheaper and easier. I have personally seen a system that extracts uranium from seawater. Current implementations yield yellow-cake at twice the market rate. There is ongoing work to tie it into a desal plant and bring that cost down. There is also work to combine it with lithium extraction.