Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

g0ing_postal t1_j257hyt wrote

Reply to comment by Techutante in UIUC Researchers propose a new way to get fresh water from seawater, without the disadvantages of traditional desalination. They say that a vertical “capture surface” that is 210 m wide and 100 m tall, could extract enough vapor floating above warm oceans to supply 500,000 people with freshwater by lughnasadh

The amount of salt produced by desalination plants in staggering

We produced and 290 million metric tons of salt worldwide in 2021: https://www.statista.com/statistics/237162/worldwide-salt-production/

Seawater contains 3.5% salt and has a density of roughly 1020kg/m3, so a cubic meter of seawater has any 35.7kg of salt https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawater

We generate tightly 95 million m3 of water from desalination plants per day globally https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination_by_country

That's about 3391.5 million kg of salt per day

290 million metric tons= 290,000 million tons

290,000/3391.5 = 85.5 days

If we processed the waste from desalination plants all the way into salt, we would fulfill the world's demand for salt in less than 3 months. That's assuming we don't produce salt from any other sources

We would end up with over 4 times the annual salt production on just the current amount of desalination

2

Techutante t1_j266o76 wrote

Yeah, and demand for fresh potable water is only likely to grow.

However thawing meltwaters from glaciers and icepacks may counter out some of that salinity. I'm not quite up on the ocean science for that though at present.

1