Is handling leftover brine accounted for in the calculations?
You know you cannot simply dump it back into ocean in one place. It is also a problem in Gibraltar or so to say they have it figured out but it costs them a lot of money.
You know you cannot simply dump it back into ocean in one place. It is also a problem in Gibraltar or so to say they have it figured out but it costs them a lot of money.
This is not the reason the US doesn't desalinate. It is actually actively making things worse in the places where it can still extract water from aquifers. Removing the water allows salt water to penetrate those thus destroying the local ecosystems. It's also speeding up the desertification of other areas.
Desalinating ocean water (done right of course) is part of the solution, not the problem.
Solutions like discussed in the article are more interesting for smaller/rural setups. Interesting but desalinating at industrial scale is a solved problem already. Can it be done cheaper. Probably and that would be nice. But it can be done economically right now. The largest challenges here are bureaucratic, not technical.
https://www.yourgibraltartv.com/society/28113-tender-awarded...
Gibraltar apparently doesn't have sewage treatment because they have some salt-water flush system for toilets due to fresh water historically being so expensive there and they seem to have had difficulty getting a treatment system that works with that.