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posted by mrpg on Thursday May 09 2019, @04:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the a-peanut-with-salt dept.

Submitted via IRC for AzumaHazuki

Radical Desalination Approach May Disrupt the Water Industry

Hypersaline brines—water that contains high concentrations of dissolved salts and whose saline levels are higher than ocean water—are a growing environmental concern around the world. Very challenging and costly to treat, they result from water produced during oil and gas production, inland desalination concentrate, landfill leachate (a major problem for municipal solid waste landfills), flue gas desulfurization in fossil-fuel power plants, and effluent from industrial processes.

If hypersaline brines are improperly managed, they can pollute both surface and groundwater resources. But if there were a simple, inexpensive way to desalinate the brines, vast quantities of water would be available for all kinds of uses, from agriculture to industrial applications, and possibly even for human consumption.

A Columbia Engineering team led by Ngai Yin Yip, assistant professor of earth and environmental engineering, reports today that they have developed a radically different desalination approach—“temperature swing solvent extraction (TSSE)”—for hypersaline brines. The study, published online in Environmental Science & Technology Letters, demonstrates that TSSE can desalinate very high-salinity brines, up to seven times the concentration of seawater. This is a good deal more than reverse osmosis, the gold-standard for seawater desalination, and can handle approximately twice the seawater salt concentrations.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @07:17AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @07:17AM (#841230)

    1. if you have a small amount of hypersaline brine you can put it in a barrel, leave it out in the sun to dry, and after you do this a few times you have a barrel of dry salts that you can bury or dump in a desert somewhere (details may vary on the specific type of salts).
    2. if you have a large amount of hypersaline brine you need to turn into a small amount somehow. Afterwards you are in situation 1, which is fine.
    the claim in this work is that they have a cheaper way of solving 2.